Most do, but even without the AI, plenty of lawyers cite cases for things that weren’t said in them. A judges clerk or court attorney usually checks these things.
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Ai is going to replace everything though!
First it’s going to replace all the jobs I don’t know how to do, since those are easy and mostly done by idiots!
/S
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I was opposite a guy who only took a two year suspension for (i) settling outside his settlement authority, (ii) making up the difference out of his own pocket, (iii) lying to his client that the trial was ongoing, (iv) billing his client for a non-existent trial to make up for the money he pulled out of his pocket to make the case go away. Now, I think this was before he got sober and he really seemed a pretty nice guy and good lawyer – but how do you survive that? You take $500 from the trust account and you’re dead.
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I know someone who hired an attorney for a wrongful death suit against a hospital, and then the attorney, also an alcoholic, proceeded to miss every possible filing deadline. Also not disbarred. Sadly, also did not recover from their alcoholism. As a recovering alcoholic myself, I have concerns about going into the law given its reputation for substance abuse issues.
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This is, sadly, down to the "they must be idiots,’ exactly the sort of thinking that I see with far too much frequency.
The combination of hubris/ DK/contempt for others makes me want to throw up
**
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This part hit me right in the gut. I can’t even fathom how much of the inner-workings of the legal process are no more sound and trustworthy than “I know a guy who knows a guy.”
Cutting it a little fine on that May 26th deadline. Here’s the Affidavit in Opposition to Motion from Peter LoDuca, which appears to indicate that Steven Schwartz was the lawyer who had produced the fictional cases.
Your affiant [I think this refers to Peter LoDuca], in reviewing the affirmation in opposition prior to filing same, simply had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the case law contained therein. Furthermore, your affiant had no reason to a doubt the sincerity of Mr. Schwartz’s research.
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I’ve seen developers take others code and pass it off as their own.
One case I caught they checked in some Open Source code as theirs, noticed that they missed the licensing bit of the code, edited that out and checked it back in. For those that aren’t familiar with source code control, it keeps a list of every change* and those changes were found and he was very rapidly canned. Thankfully none of that hit production which could’ve caused some problems.
* Not strictly true, but he didn’t have the permissions to change it, and he was nowhere near skilled enough to make sure it didn’t make it in in the first place.
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Seeing Leonard crack completely up at the 30 minute mark made my evening, though.
We all know what happens when we assume, right? It makes an ass out of u and me. 
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Ah, the “empty head, pure heart” defense. It would take like 5 minutes to check the case cites against Lexis or Westlaw (or Findlaw, f’r cryin’ out loud) but if you were careful enough to do that you wouldn’t be trying to have a chatbot do all your work for you.
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Translation from legalese: “I was too lazy to look up countervailing authority to my opponent which is part of my job in opposing the motion” and “I usually just use a rote model response to these motions and don’t bother looking at what the opponents write.”
The fact that this was all done in Federal Court is especially galling since everything is E-filed and gone over by court attorneys/clerks, especially case citations.
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