From Friday's decision by Judge Katherine Polk Failla (S.D.N.Y.) in Flycatcher Corp. LTD v. Affable Avenue LLC:
On June 26, 2025, the Court ordered Mr. Feldman to show cause in writing on or before July 10, 2025, why the brief in support of Defendant Affable Avenue LLC's ("Affable") motion to dismiss should not be stricken from the docket and sanctions imposed against him pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11. Mr. Feldman submitted his written response to the Order to Show Cause. On the same date, Plaintiffs filed a letter opposing Affable's request to file additional documents in support of its motion to dismiss. On July 14, 2025, Mr. Feldman filed, on behalf of Affable, a letter in further support of Affable's request to file additional papers in support of its motion to dismiss.
The Court looked askance at Mr. Feldman's Response because the writing style in it differed markedly from the writing style in the letter he submitted to the Court three days later. (Compare Response with Dkt. #166). Mr. Feldman's Response contains an extended quote from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and a metaphor about an ancient stylus. By contrast, his July 14, 2025 letter contains typographical errors in the very first paragraph, and, indeed, throughout. This prompted the Court to further analyze Mr. Feldman's Response. On page three, Mr. Feldman contrasts his conduct with the misconduct described in two (real) cases: Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), and Park v. Kim, 91 F.4th 610 (2d Cir. 2024). On page four of the Response, Mr. Feldman appears to quote from Mata (without providing a pin cite), as follows:
Critically, unlike the pattern of deception identified in Mata, where sanctions were imposed not merely for citing fictitious cases but for the attorneys' "failure to be forthcoming, withdraw the prior submissions, and continue to give legitimacy to fake cases in the subsequent submissions despite having multiple reasons to believe that the cases lacked authenticity," I immediately acknowledged the errors upon notification and undertook comprehensive corrective action within twenty-four hours.
This quote appears nowhere in Mata. A Google search revealed it to be a direct quote from an October 24, 2023 article that recaps an analysis of Mata done by an attorney named Christopher F. Lyon. Mr. Feldman did not attribute the quote to this article. That is especially concerning considering that he was responding to an Order to Show Cause why he should not be sanctioned for his erroneous citations. And it would be especially concerning, and indeed unacceptable, if Mr. Feldman used a large language model to draft his Response without verifying whether the quotations in it were accurately attributed.
