HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — Attorneys for a Huntsville law firm working for the state of Alabama admitted in federal court Monday that one of their firm partners used ChatGPT to find case citations to strengthen their arguments – but the citations were made up, apparently invented by the AI tool.
The story was first reported by AL.com, and the case continues to unfold.
It stems from a lawsuit filed by an Alabama prison inmate, Frankie Johnson, who alleges that state prison personnel failed to protect him, and he was attacked and stabbed multiple times on three different occasions. The issue the sides were arguing over was the timing of the defendant’s efforts to question Johnson under oath.
The false ChatGPT citations, used in two separate court filings by the lawyers arguing for the deposition, were caught and pointed out by Johnson’s attorneys. The lawyers for the Huntsville-based law firm Butler Snow have apologized and said they didn’t mean to mislead the court.
U.S. District Court Judge Anna Manasco has set a Wednesday morning hearing in Birmingham to consider sanctions against lawyers in the case.
The Butler Snow firm does a tremendous amount of business with the State of Alabama on ongoing prison lawsuits — including lawsuits brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. Butler Snow’s lead attorney in those cases, William Lunsford, is listed as having been paid $42 million by the state — since fiscal 2020, according to state records.
In court filings, Lunsford said he didn’t provide the false citations, that was firm partner Matthew Reeves, who works with Lunsford on the prison lawsuits. Lunsford said in court filings that the mistake was unacceptable and is being reviewed.
“To begin this declaration, I am personally and professionally sorry for what has occurred,” Lunsford said in an affidavit filed with the federal court. “These events do not reflect the nature or quality of work that I have worked for decades to ensure that every client receives. I apologize to the Court, to all parties, to opposing counsel and to the State of Alabama for the terrible decisions that led to an erroneous filing. We will ensure that this never occurs again.”
On Monday, Lunsford and two other lawyers – whose names are on the documents with the false citations – submitted descriptions of their roles to the court.
Reeves said he takes full responsibility and regrets the lapse in judgment and diligence.
In his affidavit, Reeves said that in reviewing planned court filings by another lawyer in the case, he saw that some of the arguments needed case citations, so he went to ChatGPT, the AI program.
“I knew generally about ChatGPT,” he wrote in the affidavit. “I performed a search to identify supporting case law for the proposition that discovery may proceed even during the pendency of other discovery issues, as to the Motion for Leave, and that general or boilerplate objections are not effective, as to the Motion to Compel.
“My search immediately identified purportedly applicable citations for those points of law. In my haste to finalize the motions and get them filed, I failed to verify the case citations returned by ChatGPT through independent review in Westlaw or PACER before including them in the Motion for Leave and Motion to Compel. I have now confirmed that the citations in the string cite on Paragraph 2 of the Motion for Leave after the citation to Rule 30(a)(2)(B) are inaccurate or do not exist.”
Butler Snow Firm Partner Matthew Reeves
He goes on to say that in the second court filing, the motion to compel, the citations are inaccurate and fail to support the argument.
Johnson’s lawyers, Jamilla Mensah and M. Wesley Smithart, notified the court about the false citations. They cited four examples and urged the court to take action.
“Defendant’s complete fabrication of case law is suggestive of an abuse of the utilization of generative artificial intelligence and should be taken very seriously by this court,” the filing argued. “As one district court articulated, ‘the use of artificial intelligence must be accompanied by the application of actual intelligence in its execution.’
“Simply put, Defense counsel failed to substantiate—with any legitimate case law—that Defendant should be granted leave to depose Mr. Johnson on June 3, 2025.”
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