A pair of Orange County immigration attorneys received temporary suspensions after the court discovered they used generative AI to write briefs that included “multiple nonexistent cases, misattributed quotations, and gross misrepresentations.”
Attorneys Mike Singh Sethi and William Rounds, both part of Sethi Law Group in Orange County, were fined $2,500 each and suspended from practicing in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for six months, according to an opinion from the court issued Wednesday. A request for comment from the firm was not immediately answered.
The ruling was clear that the discipline wasn’t issued simply for the use of AI, but “due to their filing of briefs containing multiple nonexistent cases, misattributed quotations, and gross misrepresentations of real cases, and due to their lack of candor in revealing that these fabrications and inaccuracies were the result of hallucinations by generative AI.”
“However legal papers are prepared, and however legal technology develops, the court’s procedural and ethical rules apply with equal force,” the three-judge panel wrote. “The attorneys knowingly or recklessly made false statements to this Court.”
The ruling also said that Sethi and Rounds “repeatedly denied the possibility that generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) might have produced the errors” and claimed that the errors were the “product of innocent typographical mistakes.”
Sethi and Rounds made the erroneous filings in a request to the appeals court to review an immigration decision. The court had ruled in favor of the attorneys’ clients, halting the deportation of three family members from India, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and the disciplinary ruling did not alter that November decision.
But the court did also offer a warning to other attorneys: “Be aware of the risks of overreliance on generative AI, read everything cited in a court filing—whether drafted by generative AI or not—and disclose quickly and transparently generative AI hallucinations that are inadvertently included in court filings,” the ruling said.
The post O.C. immigration attorneys suspended for filing briefs filled with AI-hallucinated errors appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
