Speaker 1: Can you tell me about a lawyer who f***ed around and found out? I'm sorry, I can't find the information. I'm only up to date through 2021. I have the information right here. Oh, f***. So, AI is going to replace lawyers. Well, not any time soon, because it finally happened. We've had our first sighting of AI lawyering in the wild, and it was, um... It was bad. It was very, very bad. Two lawyers in New York deputized JGBT to do their legal research in an airline tort case and found themselves in a direct flight to sanctions land, courtesy of one very pissed-off federal judge. These guys may have ended their legal careers for a case which was always dead on arrival. And along the way, they became internet famous, bringing the entire legal community together to point and laugh as one. So, thanks, guys. Ha ha. So, our story begins back in August of 2019, on flight 670 from San Salvador to New York's JFK Airport. Passenger Roberto Mata claims that an employee of Avianca Airlines, quote, struck him in his left knee with a metal serving cart, causing him to suffer severe personal injuries. In February of 2022, Mata sued in New York state court, alleging that he suffered, quote, grievous and painful injuries to his body and limbs, and damage and injury to his nervous system, and became sick, sore, lame, and disabled, causing him to be incapacitated, which is a lot of hassle for a bag of pretzels and a warm Sprite. Now, Avianca removed the case to federal court immediately, which means that the New York County clerk took no action and simply transferred it to the Southern District of New York, which is a federal court, where the suit was assigned to U.S. District Judge Kevin Castell. Not every case qualifies for what's called federal removal, but here, Avianca cited multiple separate grounds for Article III jurisdiction to get it into the federal courts. Now, first, international flights are governed by something called the Montreal Convention, an international treaty signed by the U.S. government, and second, the parties are what's called diverse, because Mr. Mata is a citizen of New York, and Avianca is headquartered in Bogota, Colombia. Federal courts have original jurisdiction over cases which implicate international treaties, and they have diversity jurisdiction when the plaintiff and defendant are not from within the same state. So this suit was clearly one which could be heard in federal court in New York. Now, the Montreal Convention is an international treaty signed in 1999 to standardize legal protections for air travelers, mainly by regularizing compensation for lost luggage. But it also contains a two-year statute of limitations, reckoned from the day of arrival at the destination. And you'll note that February of 2022 is more than two years after August of 2019, which meant that Mr. Mata was probably out of time and out of luck. But immediately upon removal, Avianca filed an answer denying all the allegations in Mata's admittedly bare-bones complaint. Although the airlines conceded that, quote, a Roberto Mata was listed as a passenger on Avianca Flight 670 on August 27th, 2019. And Avianca asserted several affirmative defenses, which is something that negates criminal or civil liability, even if the facts alleged are true. So for instance, Avianca claimed that if Mr. Mata was injured, it was as a result of either his own negligence or actions by another passenger. But for our purposes, we only care about two legal issues raised in the answer. The first is that the airline noted that it filed for bankruptcy way back in 2020, and Mata, as a creditor, had already missed his window to present a claim for monetary damages to the bankruptcy court. And second, Avianca's lawyers argued, quote, pursuant to Article 35 of the Montreal Convention, plaintiff's claims are barred because this action was commenced more than two years after the plaintiff arrived at his destination. Accordingly, plaintiff cannot sustain a claim under the Montreal Convention. Now this put Mata's counsel in a pickle because it's what lawyers call black letter law that they'd waited six months too long to sue the airline. And that's even before you get to the bankruptcy issue. But luckily the attorneys had an ace up their sleeve because while the defense attorneys had the law on their side, the plaintiff's attorneys had chat GPT. Now there's been a lot of talk lately about the potential for AI to revolutionize the practice of law. Most famously, entrepreneur Joshua Browder, CEO of the online task platform Do Not Pay, offered $1 million to any lawyer who would argue a Supreme Court case wearing an earpiece and speak the script produced by the company's chat bot, a version of chat GPT. That obviously never happened because it was incredibly stupid, which we've covered on this channel. Now GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer and it's a type of large language model in LLM that scans vast quantities of data and then is trained to synthesize responses to questions using predictive modeling. Now in its simplest form, a chat bot will answer your question by predicting what word comes next based on the information called from whatever data set that it was trained on. And chat GPT in particular is an AI chat bot released to the public by the Research Laboratory OpenAI in November of 2022. The problem, however, when it comes to the practice of law is that right now chat bots are still prone to what are called hallucinations or if you wanna get technical, they just make stuff up sometimes. And they can even be trained to lie, something that Browder actually bragged about. In December, he tweeted that he trained his chat GPT plugin to lie to a cable company in a service call. The AI just exaggerated internet outages similar to how a customer would. A customer who was okay with lying to another human being, I guess. Facing blowback from legal authorities for practicing law without a license, Browder eventually retreated and pulled most of the offerings which could be classified as legal documents off of his site. And although it's still billed as the world's first robot lawyer. But obviously that wasn't going to be the end of the matter. Right now, lawyers are already using artificial intelligence to sort through reams of discovery documents. And it's probably inevitable that one day there will be models able to sort through case law and statutes effectively to help with legal research. But as Roberto Mata's lawyers discovered, that day is not today. Because in January of 2023, Avianca filed a motion to dismiss the case, citing the two-year statute of limitations under the Montreal Convention and the pending bankruptcy. Now, Mata's lawyer, Peter Loduca, filed an opposition arguing that New York State's three-year statute of limitations trumped the Montreal Convention's two-year cap or alternatively that Avianca's bankruptcy told that has paused the statute of limitations and thus there was still time for Mata's claim. Now, as a lawyer, I can tell you that this is a rather odd argument. The Montreal Convention exists to allow international businesses, which operate in multiple countries to standardize their practices so they don't have to worry about dozens of different sets of local laws. And it would defeat the whole purpose of the treaty signed by the US government to allow individual states to impose their own regulations and statute of limitations on the airline carriers who happened to sell tickets to one of their residents. Nevertheless, Loduca argued that Mata was entitled to file in New York State court and thus New York's three-year statute of limitations applied to his claim. He wrote, quote, it was the defendant, Avianca, who chose to remove the action to this court, the federal court, at which point the action was already commenced in a timely manner. Both federal and state courts alike have continually held that the Montreal Convention does not preempt state law remedies and that plaintiffs are entitled to choose the form in which to bring their claim. And in support of this argument, Loduca cited several federal court decisions including one from the Fifth Circuit, captioned Varghese versus China Southern Airlines, and one from the 11th Circuit called Zycherman versus Korean Airlines. Now, Avianca is represented in this dispute by a law firm called Condon Forsyth, which specializes in aviation law. And you can bet their bottom dollar that these guys probably know the Montreal Convention inside and out. So it might've come as a surprise to them to read a quotation from the Fifth Circuit saying that a bankruptcy filing told the statute of limitations under the Montreal Convention. But as you've probably already guessed, neither the Varghese decision or the Zycherman decision actually exist. I got the worst attorneys. And neither do at least three of the other cases cited in the Loduca filing. And in reply, Avianca's lawyers wrote, quote, although plaintiff ostensibly cites to a variety of cases in opposition to this motion, the undersigned has been unable to locate most of the cases cited in plaintiff's affirmation in opposition. And the few cases which the undersigned has been able to locate do not stand for the propositions for which they are cited. Which is basically lawyer speak for you're in huge trouble. Now, you're watching this video, which means that you already know that many of these cases are not real. Now, there are a couple of possibilities here. One is that some of the lawyers could have asked ChattGPT to write the brief or portions of it and ChattGPT cited two fake cases. The lawyer also could have just made them up. Lawyers write placeholder arguments all the time and then scrap them when the legal research turns out the wrong way. But given that the original brief cites case names with real looking citations, it's likely that the lawyer just used ChattGPT and just didn't check the work that was generated. Now, we'll get to that in just a second. And that's when all hell broke loose because on April 11th, Judge Castell issued a show cause order giving Laduka a week to hand over the text of the decisions in Varghese, Zycherman and the seven other cases. Claiming to be quote, out of the office on vacation, Laduka requested and got an extra week to produce the opinions. Now, a couple of things to note, New York judges are in the habit of just scribbling their answer on the motion itself. New York is just weird that way. There are some other jurisdictions that do that too. Sometimes it's just easier to just write stuff down on the thing that's presented to you. But also, if you are printing real opinions off of Westlaw or Lexis or any of the other legal databases that real lawyers use all the time, the task that was requested takes about 20 to 30 seconds. It does not require an extra week to complete. That's what we call foreshadowing. Now, a show cause order or order to show cause is an order from the judge that's basically give me your best defense as to why I shouldn't sanction you. And that's what this briefing was all about. So on April 25th, Laduka produced an affidavit stating that he was annexing eight of the demanded decisions, but that the attached production quote, may not be inclusive of the entire opinions, but only what it made available by online database, which is, that's not how humans, let alone lawyers talk. It's the kind of thing that you write when you're hiding something. And he said that he had been unable to locate the Zuckerman opinion at all. And that's not good either. And in fact, this whole response is just nonsense. It is trivially easy to locate a federal court decision, particularly if you have the case site, you can download these decisions off the federal judiciary's website via pacer. You can get it for free from Google scholar. You can take a field trip to your local library and pull the appropriate volume off the shelf and snap a picture of it on your phone if you want to. And if you can't locate a federal case, that's because it doesn't exist. Now let's take a moment and talk about case citations. Now I know this is going to sound incredibly boring, but I promise you this is going to pay off in a huge way later on in this video. Now a case citation is something to let the court or opposing counsel know what case you're signing and where. And really it's just three things. It's a number, a couple of letters in the middle and another number. Now let's start with the thing in the middle. That usually refers to the reporter in which the case appears. Now a reporter is a set of books, literal, actual, physical books that you could find in any law library that contains a whole bunch of cases. That's generally what a law library is there for. It's a compendium of all the cases that are out there. And here we're talking about federal cases. So if we look at the fake citation for Varghese, it has an F in the middle and that F stands for the federal reporter. That is the volume of books that contain all of the federal cases. In particular, the federal appeals court opinions and it contains all of them. And in fact, there are so many of them that the 3D refers to the third edition of the federal reporter, i.e newer cases than you might find in the second edition and older cases than you might find in the fourth edition. And then the first number refers to the volume. So 925 would be the 925th volume of the federal reporter. Like I said, there are a lot of these books. And then the second number is the page number of the volume. So 1339 is page 1339 of book 925. Easy. You're already smarter than these lawyers. And since you rarely actually look it up in the physical book, you just plug those numbers and letters into a search bar of a legal database or even Google Scholar and bam, you go straight to the case. It's really, really easy. So basically there's no defense for them not plugging the citation in and finding the actual cases and reading them. And we'll get to the completely fabricated opinions in a second. But the fact that they couldn't even find one of the decisions is a terrible result in and of itself. In all my years of practice, I have never filed anything without checking every single case citation to make sure that it is what it purports to be. Lawyers crib from other lawyers all the time. And you can never assume that the prior lawyer did their research. You have to go back, read the cases and make sure that not only do they say what they're being cited for, but that there isn't some other part of the decision that's devastating for your case. Not to mention, you have to make sure that that case hasn't been overturned later on. So the fact that you can't find the case means that you didn't do your homework the first time around when this thing was submitted to the court. Very, very bad. But second of all, even a cursory examination of these cases would be enough to tell a practicing attorney that they were very clearly not real. And not just because of the bizarre pagination, shifting fonts and apparently handwritten characters in the middle of the text. As the Opening Arguments podcast pointed out, the Varghese decision, supposedly out of the 11th Circuit, is credited to judges Jordan, Rosenbaum and Higginbotham. And while judges Jordan and Rosenbaum do in fact sit on the 11th Circuit, Judge Patrick Higginbotham is a senior judge on the 5th Circuit. And similarly, the plaintiff is described as Susan Varghese, personal representative of the estate of George Scaria Varghese. And then a page later as Anish Varghese. And any amount of digging into these cases would prove that they were fake. Not least because the internal citations, that is the cases they refer to, are mostly like the Zycherman case that Leduca couldn't find, are just made up. And it's not a coincidence that the two real decisions are upwards of 25 pages long, single-spaced and in tiny font. Which is generally how long cases tend to be, especially in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in the 5th and 11th Circuits. While the cases that the plaintiff cited clock in at around five pages or less, which is just about the outer limit of what CHAT GPT will produce and practically written in crayon. But Avyanka's lawyers at Condon are professionals and clearly they didn't want to gild the lily here. So they just responded the next day with a polite letter to the court saying, respectfully submitting that the authenticity of many of these cases is questionable. So this occasioned a second show cause order from Judge Castell, who was clearly good and mad at that point. And he wrote, the court is presented with an unprecedented circumstance. A submission filed by a plaintiff's counsel in opposition to a motion to dismiss is replete with citations to non-existent cases. Six of these submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations. Set forth below is an order to show cause why plaintiff's counsel ought not be sanctioned. And the judge went on to say that he called up the 11th circuit himself and confirmed that there is no Varghese opinion. And he went through all of the bogus internal citations in the fake Varghese opinion that Loduca submitted to the court. He told Loduca to show up on June 8th and explain why he shouldn't be in deep, deep trouble. Now, as a lawyer, seeing the mistakes made by these attorneys is honestly extremely hard to watch because it didn't have to be that way. There are great lawyers all over the country. And now my firm, the Eagle Team, is accepting new clients. If you've been in a train wreck like these lawyers or suffered a data breach or dealt with medical malpractice, we can represent you or help find you the right attorney who can. Just click on the link in the description for a free consultation with my team. Because you don't just need a legal team, you need the Eagle Team. Just click on the link below. So three weeks later, Loduca filed an affidavit with the court in which he explained that he'd done none of the legal work on this case despite his name being on the filings. Now that's not terribly unusual. It looks like what happened here is he was acting as local counsel, which means that if you're an out-of-state attorney with a client but you need someone with a law license in a particular state, you reach out to someone who sort of double-checks things and files the actual filings. And Loduca explained that it was instead Stephen Schwartz, one of his colleagues at the law firm of Levidow, Levidow, and Oberman, had been responsible for the case from the beginning. Only Schwartz wasn't licensed to appear in federal court. So when the case was removed from state court, he continued to do the work and let Loduca take the credit, which is not a great excuse, even though Loduca says he's been practicing law with Schwartz since 1996 and had no reason to doubt his buddy's abilities. But the thing is, as an attorney, you are responsible for absolutely everything that has your name and signature on it. And frankly, Avianca's motion in March saying, hey, we can't find these cases on Westlaw following the court's order to produce them probably would have prompted any reasonable lawyer to check the case sites himself before submitting them to the court with a notarized affidavit swearing that they were good. And Loduca's affidavit was accompanied by an affidavit from Schwartz stating that, quote, it was in consultation with the generative artificial intelligence website, ChatGBT, that your affiant did locate and cite the following cases in the affirmation and opposition submitted, which this court has found to be non-existent. Schwartz then threw himself on the mercy of the court for his mistake in relying, quote, on the legal opinions provided to him by a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable. He explained that he'd never used ChatGBT to do legal research before and was, quote, unaware of the possibility that his content could be false. Schwartz said that Loduca had nothing to do with his screw up and that he had, quote, no intent to deceive this court nor the defendant. He finished by saying that, quote, he greatly regretted having utilized generative artificial intelligence to supplement the legal research performed herein and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity. Schwartz also attached undated screenshots of him allegedly asking ChatGBT if Varghese was real and being assured that they absolutely were, which is, you know, again, not how you research, let alone a ninth grade essay about mating habits of pandas, much less a legal brief submitted in federal court. But by now, all of law Twitter was losing its mind and the insane spectacle courtesy of Mike Dunford, who popularized this total debacle and Judge Castell was volcanically furious. And the next day, the court entered a third show cause order commanding Schwartz and the Levadol law firm to get themselves down to the courthouse along with Loduca to explain what the hell was going on and why they shouldn't be all sanctioned for their activities. And he added a new demand to know why they shouldn't be punished for, quote, the use of a false and fraudulent notarization in the affidavit filed on April 25th because some of the documents require that the signature line be authenticated by a witness who has demonstrated that he or she is a person in good character. Now, typically that witness is called a notary public and they've been licensed by the state to verify with a special stamp or seal that the document was signed in their presence by the person whose name appears on it. And Loduca's April 25th affidavit accompanying the fake cases he submitted to the court was notarized by Schwartz, which is weird, even taking into consideration that lots of attorneys in New York maintain a notary certification because every other document in plaintiff's case was notarized by the same Levadao paralegal. But this document in which Loduca seems to take responsibility for what looks like fraud on the court perpetrated by Schwartz is notarized by Schwartz himself. And even weirder, it's dated January 25th, not April 25th. But as we discussed, the cases that they submitted to the judge were weird. The formatting was wrong. They were very short. They have the wrong judges. The parties are wrong. And the analysis is basically nonsense. Basically, getting caught citing to fake cases, they then took all that time to write the cases out as best they could. It's hard to say. But the lawyers say that they asked Chachi Petit for the underlying cases. And when they got back a small amount of text, they thought it was giving them excerpts from real cases, which still is not a defense. You need the entire case to be able to be sure that it stands for what you're citing it for. But that's beside the point. At base though, it's clear that no one checked or read the cases that were cited when they wrote the original brief. And we also know that the fabricated cases were not created until the court asked the lawyers to look into them, which is bad. It's extremely bad. So at this point, it dawned on the plaintiff's lawyers that something very bad was about to happen. The whole squad of outside lawyers entered their appearances on behalf of Schwartz and Levinow on one hand and Leduca on the other. And these lawyers very gingerly suggested that if the court was in a mood to postpone the June 8th hearing, they'd sure appreciate a few extra days to get up to speed. Now, Judge Castell testily replied to Schwartz and Levinow's request by granting them two extra days for their written reply, noting that the hearing remains scheduled for June 8th, 2023. And his reply to Leduca was even more ominous, stating, Mr. Leduca is differently situated from Mr. Schwartz and the firm. He has availed himself of a full and fair opportunity to respond to the court's OSC regarding non-existent case law and three possible grounds for sanctions. He is not entitled to a do-over. So the lawyers filed their response and they basically doubled down on the theory that Schwartz was too dumb to be mendacious and Leduca just wasn't paying attention. And the judge then called the hearing and made both of these attorneys actually take the stand and testify under oath, oh my God. Now, before I get to what happened in court, I need to teach you a new word. It's a word that my German friends explained to me a few years back and my God, does it apply here. The word is fremdschamen. In other words, to feel secondhand embarrassment or to feel ashamed about something someone else has done to be embarrassed because someone else has embarrassed themselves. So with that new vocabulary word in mind, let's look to what happened at the hearing and thanks to the inner city press, we know roughly what happened in court and Judge Castell asked Leduca to testify first. So Judge Castell asked Leduca under oath, what was your understanding of your obligation in connection with your March 1 submission under rule 11? Leduca responds, it was factual and truthful. I relied on my colleagues Steven Schwartz with me at Levida with Levido and Elbermann. Did you do anything other than sign your affirmation? Did you read any of the cases? No. Did you do anything to make sure that these cases existed? No. Then Avianca replied, I did not read it. Later on, the judge asked, do you recall writing to me you were going on vacation and the court giving you until April 25th? Yes. Was it true that you were going on vacation? No, judge. Pro tip, boy, do not lie to the judge ever, either verbally or in writing. Just don't do it because otherwise you might have to admit that you lied to the judge under oath. The judge asked, you did not see this was a bogus case? No. You see that it was in different fonts? A little bit larger. Who typed this? I believe it was Mr. Schwartz. And again, I'll note, acting as basically local counsel, it wasn't crazy that another lawyer was doing most of the work here. But when that lawyer submits a filing and signs it, they're responsible for everything that's in that filing. Ah, boy, not a good look. And with that background, Schwartz then takes the stand and Judge Castell asks, how many cases have you done? A thousand? Yes. How do you conduct legal research? I research cases. Do you read them? Yes. The judge asked, did you prepare the March 1 memo? Yes, I used Fastcase, but it did not have federal cases that I needed to find. I tried Google. I had heard of ChatGPT. All right, what did it produce for you? I asked it questions. About the Montreal Convention or the position you wanted to take? Yes, for our position. You were not asking for an objective view, but cases to support your position? I asked it for its analysis. Did you ask ChatGPT what the law was or only for a case to support you? It wrote a case for you. Do you cite cases without reading them? No. What caused your departure here? I thought ChatGPT was a search engine. And basically, what you can see here is that there was no good answer. Yes, he has to claim that he reads all the cases, but he clearly didn't read the cases here. The judge catches him in a lie and he basically has no defense or at least no good defense here. Because even if ChatGPT was a search engine, he didn't read the underlying cases. And as a result, he cited a bunch of fake cases. And on top of that, the ChatGPT transcripts that were provided to the court continually say that it cannot provide legal advice. And it's a language model and cannot access real-time legal databases or provide up-to-date case law. And the thing about case law is it has to be up-to-date. And then, days later, fabricated a bunch of cases possibly using ChatGPT. And that's not gonna save him here. And that's why the judge leans in. Did you look for the Varghese case? Yes, I couldn't find it. And yet, you cited it in your filing. I had no idea ChatGPT made up cases. I was operating under a misperception. Mr. Schwartz, I think you were selling yourself short. You say you verify cases. I thought there were cases that could not be found on Google. Six cases, none found on Google. This non-existent case Varghese, the excerpt you had was inconsistent even on the first page. Can we agree that's legal gibberish? I see that now. I thought it was excerpts. Man, you can cut the Fram Shaman with a knife right now. Judge Castell continues, Avianca put your cases in quotations. You know what F3D means, right? To which Schwartz replies, Federal District Third Department? No, we went over this. It's a book that contains cases. I have one right here. Look, it's the Federal Reporter. This is the second edition. It contains a bunch of cases, the things you're supposed to read before you submit stuff to federal court. It's not a federal district. It's definitely not the third department. So the judge then asks, have you heard of the Federal Reporter? And he says, yes. The judge asks, that's a book, right? Correct. Glad we're on the same page. Finally. The judge goes in for the kill one more time and asks, so you were the one going on vacation returning on April 18th? Yes. When you saw the court's order, it wanted to see the cases. Did it cross your mind that the court checked for the cases? I wanted to comply. And the judge continues, you told me that Chachapiti supplemented your research, but what was it supplementing? I'd used fast case at the beginning. Chachapiti wasn't supplementing your research. It was your research, right? Yes. Yeah. So the media has talked about how this is lawyers using Chachapiti and things going awry. But what it's really revealing is that these lawyers just did an all around terrible job and it just happened to tangentially involve Chachapiti. There are no good answers here. And so the judge summarized at the end, okay, some final comments. I will be taking this under advisement and entering a written decision. It's been called a mistake, but there's more. The record will reflect whether that put Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Laduka on actual notice that their cases were non-existent. Mr. Laduka was asked for the cases. We know what he did and Mr. Schwartz did. Man, I just want to die. And I wasn't even involved in this case. Frem shaman, man, RIP. Now I've always been skeptical about AI lawyers on this channel, but hey, it can't be worse than these two. Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Laduka probably would have benefited from today's sponsor, 80,000 Hours. They're a nonprofit that helps people find careers that aim at solving the world's most pressing problems like artificial intelligence might be. And 80,000 Hours has been researching the worst case risks from AI. And they have tons of in-depth material on their website about whether these risks are real and how seriously we should take them, what an AI caused existential catastrophe could actually look like and what you can look into doing if you want to help contribute to making things go well. That's because 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people find fulfilling careers that do good. And their research suggests that people working to help us avoid the worst risks from AI might be a really great way to make a positive difference in the world. 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And after that, click on this link over here for more Legal Eagle or I'll see you in court.