Originally published at: Top eviction lawyer barely sanctioned for citing fake cases possibly made by AI | Boing Boing
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Maybe the reason the sanctions don’t make a lot of sense on closer examination is because the court relied on AI to write its decision.
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I’ll bet an examination into the relationship between this creepy lawyer and whoever determined the fine amount would reveal an interesting story. I hope LAist will do some follow-up on that.
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Or it could just be a case of legal professionals cutting each other way too much slack as a professional courtesy, much like how cops frequently let fellow cops get away with traffic violations and such even if they don’t know each other.
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It’s professional courtesy for sure, but a particularly egregious and blatant one. That difference of $1.00 is someone making a statement to the legal community that this lawyer is above the rules of professional conduct because of his connections.
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I don’t understand. If lawyers are going to rely on computing technology to make cases, why haven’t they adopted reference spreadsheets instead? It just seems that much more reliable.
It wouldn’t be entirely surprising if it’s not even all that interesting.
That’s not to say it’s not pernicious to outright criminal; but it seems much more likely that there are a bunch of people who have a largely collegial attitude toward one another and see efficiently moving rental-related litigation through the system as both basically a good thing and their job; rather than there being some tale of notoriously ruthless scumbag Dennis having the dirt on Judge A and hooking Judge B up with hookers and coke to get his way.
If anything, it would probably be more heartening if, in fact, there is some sordid story; because that would suggest that Block is acting contrary to the prevailing professional and conscience standards of the group and so needs to buy, befriend, threaten, etc. to get his way; rather than it being the case that everyone is on board with low-effort litigation against poors; but had to gently chide him about using a bot rather than a paralegal because not even pretending to care is unseemly.
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$1000 fine. That’s, what, two hours of billing for ten minutes of figuring out ChatGPT and five minutes cleaning up the grammar in a text editor? I bet they made a net profit.
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I occasionally have to mark uni student essays. I’ve picked up on more than one where they’ve gone and carefully done the rewording and cleaning up, but i still could tell pretty instantly it was ChatGPT (and they subsequently admitted). The tip-off? No argument or narrative. Paragraphs contained facts, and emotive language, but didn’t fit together as a whole. Plus it was very boring and wordy.
Now I’ve got no doubt AI will be able to do that soon, but for now I’m still telling them off while I can 
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In finance, making (repeated) transactions just under the reportable amount of $10k is grounds for a Suspicious Activity Report. Not sure why lawyer reporting should be any different - $999 clearly seems to reflect being aware of the $1000 threshold.
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