From the Report and Recommendation in Davis v. Marion County Superior Court Juvenile Detention Center, filed Tuesday by Magistrate Judge Mark Dinsmore (S.D. Ind.):
In [a] brief, Mr. Sture included two citations that he concedes do not exist….Mr. Sture acknowledged that he was responsible for the errors in the brief that he signed and filed. However, he took the position that the main reason for the errors in his brief was the short deadline (three days) he was given to file it. He explained that, due to the short timeframe and his busy schedule, he asked his paralegal (who once was, but is not currently, a licensed attorney) to draft the brief, and Mr. Sture did not have time to carefully review the paralegal's draft before filing it.
[The Magistrate Judge briefly explained the reason for the unusually short deadline, and noted that, "while Mr. Sture did only have three days to file his response after the motion to compel was filed, he had much more time than that to consider and research the issues that were ultimately addressed in the response brief"; for more on that, read the full opinion. -EV]
Further, while Mr. Sture made much at the hearing about the fact that he filed his response brief literally at the eleventh hour (the brief was, in fact, filed at 11:00 p.m. on the due date), he further represented that he subscribes to LEXIS. It would have taken only a few minutes to check the validity of the citations in the brief using LEXIS before filing it.
Mr. Sture failed to take even that most basic of actions, and therefore did not catch the fact that the brief contained citations that did not exist. The most logical explanation for the citation to non-existent authority is, of course, the use of generative AI to conduct legal research and/or draft the brief. The issue of "hallucinated case[s] created by generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard" has been "widely discussed by courts grappling with fictitious legal citations and reported by national news outlets."
