A federal judge in Mississippi has punished all four lawyers on opposing sides in a civil trial and canceled the proceedings after some of them, relying on artificial intelligence, cited fake legal cases in court filings.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/us/ai-lawyers-sanctioned-mississippi.html
In an order filed on Monday, Sharion Aycock, a senior U.S. District Court judge, wrote that the four lawyers had violated Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure when they certified that the information in their filings was factual.
I think one concerning thing is that this is the easiest thing to check. I mean, at some point, I assume that someone is going to rig something up to LexisNexis to actually validate the existence of cited cases, because that’s pretty simple and mechanical. Heck, even those lawyers, even if they don’t have any tech people at their fingertips, could have had a paralegal check citations or something. It really shouldn’t be that fundamentally hard for a lawyer to avoid getting in trouble for this specific issue, even if they generated the text with an LLM.
My bigger concern is that if lawyers are willing to put stuff like this out, they’re presumably also willing to put out information that hasn’t been checked where the errors are subtler and it’s harder to find erroneous material. In the case of citing nonexistent cases, it’s really easy to say “the lawyer clearly didn’t even look at this”, because it’s hard to make that kind of error if you have read over it. This is, once highlighted, flagrant and obvious. But…there’s potential for subtler errors, where it’s harder to tell whether the lawyer did at least try to review the material and just made a basic error, and thus it’s harder to impose punishments for it.
To make things even more confusing:
The case in question involved a contractual dispute between lawyer Tom Withers and the city of Aberdeen, Mississippi, over apparently unpaid legal fees (Withers was not representing himself and was not sanctioned by the court).
This case is comedy at its finest.
It gets even funnier. Only two lawyers committed the malpractice, but they were working “pro hac” which means they aren’t licensed in that court but have been granted temporary permission. This isn’t uncommon, but it usually requires a sign off from an attorney that IS barred in that court. That’s where the other two lawyers come in. You need local lawyers who can quickly show up to court.
In practice being that local lawyer is a pretty good gig, you’re basically being paid to sign off on stuff and otherwise have no work to do. The catch is though, you are signing off. Your signature means you vouch for those fillings, even though realistically you aren’t going to double check them because you assume your fellow pro hac attorney isn’t committing malpractice.
So they just got totally fucked by their colleagues. It’s incomprehensible because judges have clerks that check every assertion in a motion so there’s no fucking way this would ever slide. The judge explains how they are fucked in the sanctions order. Oops.
Gotta say, Withers does not have a fool for a client, yet still somehow ended up with a fool for a lawyer.
GOOD.
