From a declaration in Green Building Initiative, Inc. v. Green Globe Int'l, Inc., a case I wrote about last month (Apparent AI Hallucinations in Filing from Two >500-Lawyer Firms):
In preparing the Reply brief, I performed legal research on Westlaw for authorities supporting arguments set forth in the brief. I included some of those authorities I found on Westlaw into the brief.
In generating the Reply brief, I also used Microsoft's Copilot for its editing functions in an effort to review and improve the draft document by fixing grammar, spelling, and improving badly phrased sentences. To be clear: I did not use Copilot for research nor would I use generative artificial intelligence for legal research since I am aware of generative AI's potential for "hallucination." Because I am concerned about client privacy, I cut and paste only the portions that did not contain any client information from the Word document into Copilot, and then I pasted Copilot's revisions back into the document.
Not by way of excuse, but rather explanation of context, unfortunately, I was in a rush to complete the initial draft of the Reply brief because I was traveling to the east coast related to a terminal illness in my family, and I failed to pay close enough attention to the details of what I was doing when I was drafting the brief. I entered a prompt into Copilot to instruct it to improve the writing in the brief, and merely expected Copilot to refine my writing; I never expected Copilot to insert any case citations, much less hallucinated ones. As such, I did not carefully review the Reply as revised by Copilot, and therefore, I did not recognize that Copilot inserted two hallucinated citations, especially since Page v. Parsons is an Oregon Court of Appeals decision frequently cited in anti-SLAPP cases. I made a terrible error in not doing so before filing the document….
