US lawyer sanctioned after caught using ChatGPT for court brief
Source: The Guardian
Sat 31 May 2025 18.40 EDT
Last modified on Sat 31 May 2025 18.41 EDT
The Utah court of appeals has sanctioned a lawyer after he was discovered to have used ChatGPT for a filing he made in which he referenced a nonexistent court case. Earlier this week, the Utah court of appeals made the decision to sanction Richard Bednar over claims that he filed a brief which included false citations.
According to court documents reviewed by ABC4, Bednar and Douglas Durbano, another Utah-based lawyer who was serving as the petitioner’s counsel, filed a “timely petition for interlocutory appeal”. Upon reviewing the brief which was written by a law clerk, the respondent’s counsel found several false citations of cases.
“It appears that at least some portions of the Petition may be AI-generated, including citations and even quotations to at least one case that does not appear to exist in any legal database (and could only be found in ChatGPT and references to cases that are wholly unrelated to the referenced subject matter,” the respondent’s counsel said in documents reviewed by ABC4.
The outlet reports that the brief referenced a case titled “Royer v Nelson”, which did not exist in any legal database. Following the discovery of the false citations, Bednar “acknowledged ‘the errors contained in the petition’ and apologized”, according to a document from the Utah court of appeals, ABC4 reports. It went on to add that during a hearing in April, Bednar and his attorney “acknowledged that the petition contained fabricated legal authority, which was obtained from ChatGPT, and they accepted responsibility for the contents of the petition”.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/31/utah-lawyer-chatgpt-ai-court-brief
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... using ChatGPT is so much cheaper than hiring a staff of legal research assistants. 
I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV, but there has been talk in the last several years about who will lose their high-paid jobs to automation in the near future. I've even posted it on DU from time to time. Example: Some truck drivers and delivery personnel will lose their jobs to self-driving vehicles, and that's already happening.
One of the shocking predictions is that researchers in the legal field, law clerks for example, will be replaced by automation (computers and bots that do the same work.) Using ChatGPT and other aps is the first baby-step towards giving up the human interface. In another 10 years the law field won't consider doing research without automation of some kind.
