AI and the law
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Article in LAist (10/12/23);
This Prolific LA Eviction Law Firm Was Caught Faking Cases In Court. Did They Misuse AI?
Dennis Block runs what he says is California’s “leading eviction law firm.” A judge said legal citations submitted in Block's name for a recent case were fake. Six legal experts told LAist the errors likely stemmed from AI misuse.
By David Wagner
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- Dennis P. Block and Associates, which describes itself as California’s “leading eviction law firm,” was recently sanctioned by an L.A. County Superior Court judge over a court filing the judge found contained fake case law.
- Six legal experts told LAist there’s a likely explanation behind the filing’s errors: misuse of a generative artificial intelligence program. They said they thought Block’s filing bears striking similarities to a brief prepared by a New York attorney who admitted to using ChatGPT back in May.
- Block’s firm was ordered to pay $999 over the violation. That’s $1 below the threshold that would have required the firm to report the sanction to the state bar for further investigation and possible disciplinary action.
- In interviews with three former clients and a review of 12 malpractice or negligence lawsuits filed against Block or his firm, LAist found more allegations of mishandled evictions.
When landlords in Southern California want to evict their tenants, they often hire Dennis Block. His law firm, Dennis P. Block and Associates, describes itself as the state’s “leading eviction law firm.”
Block once reportedly called himself, “A man who has evicted more tenants than any other human being on the planet Earth.”
First thing that popped into my mind: I wonder if he is related to H. & R. Block.
But in one recent eviction case, Block didn’t just lose. His firm was also sanctioned for submitting a court filing a judge said was “rife with inaccurate and false statements.”
At first glance, the filing from April looks credible. It’s properly formatted. Block’s signature at the bottom lends a stamp of authority. Case citations are provided to bolster Block’s argument for why the tenant should be evicted.
But when L.A. Superior Court Judge Ian Fusselman took a closer look, he spotted a major problem. Two of the cases cited in the brief were not real. Others had nothing to do with eviction law, the judge said.
“This was an entire body of law that was fabricated,” Fusselman said during the sanction hearing. “It's difficult to understand how that happened.”
The court never got to the bottom of exactly how the filing was prepared. But six legal experts told LAist they could think of a likely explanation: misuse of a generative AI program.
These programs, the best known of which is ChatGPT, have come under increasing scrutiny in the legal profession. While some lawyers see potential for reducing costs to clients, experts agree that failing to check work produced by such tools is risky and unethical.
Law professors and malpractice attorneys who reviewed Block’s filing told us — based on the language used — that’s likely what happened in this case.
“I think it's virtually certain that the lawyer involved used some kind of [generative] artificial intelligence program to draft the brief,” said Russell Korobkin, a professor at UCLA School of Law who recently moderated a panel on AI in the legal profession.
,,.
So far it's a lot of suspicion, speculation, and accusation, but no proof.
Legal experts told us they thought the filing from Block’s firm that led to sanctions bears striking similarities to a brief prepared by a New York attorney who admitted in May to using ChatGPT. It was the first widely reported example of an attorney misusing ChatGPT since the tool debuted last year.
Like the New York filing, Block’s brief falls apart upon checking the case citations. It cited 51 Scott Street, LLC v. Sheehan (2019) and Cole v. Stevenson (1998), both of which are fictitious, according to the judge.
“This filing has the usual hallmarks of what's known as a hallucination,” said Jonathan Choi, a professor at USC Gould School of Law who reviewed the brief at LAist’s request.
Hallucinations are a known problem in which programs like ChatGPT “tend to produce things that look convincing, but actually have no basis in reality,” he said.
Chris Hoofnagle, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, said the problem stems from how platforms like ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs, for short) work.
Based on a user’s prompt, they mine vast troves of data to predict words that should come next in a sentence. They can produce stunningly detailed documents full of words seemingly written by a human. But often those words bear no relation to the truth.
“LLMs can generate fake information that basically is what you want to believe,” Hoofnagle said. “LLMs say these things in such an unqualified and confident way that they're convincing.”
…
Ari Waldman, a UC Irvine School of Law professor, said tools like ChatGPT — if left unchecked — could lead to miscarriages of justice.
If you read the report of the New York filing where a lawyer admitted that he used ChatGPT, you will see that he was "unaware of the possibility that its contents could be false." This is proof positive that, if you ever use AI to prepare any important documents, you need to scrupulously check all of its statements. Some of them could be hallucinations, even though they may look genuine.
Selected readings
- "ChatGPT does Emily Dickinson writing a recipe for Pad Thai (and haiku too)" (6/9/23)
- "Pablumese" (3/22/23)
- "The mind of artificial intelligence" (3/22/23)
- "Style? Stance? What?" (10/27/18)
- "An example of ChatGPT 'hallucinating'?" (4/16/23)
- "Desultory philological, literary, and historical notes on Xanadu" (4/4/23)
- "Hallucinations: In Xanadu did LLMs vainly fancify" (4/3/23)
- "Detecting LLM-created essays?" (12/20/22)
- "Alexa down, ChatGPT up?" (12/8/22)
- "Bing gets weird — and (maybe) why" (2/16/23)
- "ChatGPT-4: threat or boon to the Great Firewall?" (3/21/23)
- "ChatGPT writes VHM" (2/28/23)
- "ChatGPT: Theme and Variations" (2/21/23)
- "GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-Trained Model" (1/25/2023)
- "ChatGPT writes Haiku" (12/21/22)
- "Artificial Intelligence in Language Education: with a note on GPT-3" (1/4/23)
- "DeepL Translator" (2/16/23)
- "Uh-oh! DeepL in the classroom; it's already here" (2/22/23)
- "This is the 4th time I've gotten Jack and his beanstalk" (3/15/23)
- "ChatGPT does cuneiform studies" (5/21/23)
- "The perils of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the PRC" (4/17/23)
- "Vignettes of quality data impoverishment in the world of PRC AI" (2/23/23)
- "Translation and analysis" (9/13/04)
- "Welcome to China" (3/10/14)
- "LLMs as coders?" (6/6/23)
- "ChatGPT has a sense of humor (sort of)" (6/10/23)
- "The AI threat: keep calm and carry on" (6/29/23)
[Thanks to Kent McKeever]
Philip Taylor said,
October 15, 2023 @ 8:22 am
"Block’s firm was ordered to pay $999 over the violation" — USD 999 ? Am I too having a hallucination ? Had the judge not exercised due diligence, a totally unjustified eviction would almost certainly have taken place. Is USD 999 really thought to be an appropriate penalty in such a case ? I would have thought that USD 999 999 might have been a more appropriate amount, if the judge were really seeking to (a) penalise Block’s firm, and (b) deter other legal firms from similar malpractice.
AntC said,
October 15, 2023 @ 4:50 pm
@PT Am I too having a hallucination ?
The explanation for that figure is right there in the text Victor quotes. The link expands:
The more important question (and I can't find an answer in the article) is did the judge award the defendant's costs against Block's firm? As the article goes on to say of another case, this can amount to 'hundreds of thousands of dollars'.
/df said,
October 17, 2023 @ 8:37 pm
Previously: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/lawyers-have-real-bad-day-in-court-after-citing-fake-cases-made-up-by-chatgpt/
J.W. Brewer said,
October 18, 2023 @ 4:36 pm
@Philip Taylor & AntC: I can assure you as a working US lawyer that even in the rare case where a judge is so irked as to sanction a lawyer for a filing that falls below some very low minimum threshold of good faith and honesty, the monetary amount of the sanctions is typically too low to create an incentive structure going forward that is likely to prevent such misbehavior from recurring. So there's arguably a systemic problem but it's not that this lenient-sounding judge is an outlier.
@AntC: the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" is what a small-time landlord who was a client of Block's firm was allegedly billed by Block's firm in a case it allegedly handled improperly. It is hard to believe that a tenant would run up that sort of tab fighting eviction, and if they did that would strongly suggest they had not been well-advised. In the particular situation, the tenant essentially won even if they didn't actually have a good defense because the judge was (rightly) irked at the misconduct of Block's firm. So they would be well-advised to take the possibly-undeserved win and not seem greedy.
One systemic problem is that the stakes in any given residential landlord/tenant dispute are usually sufficiently low that it does not make economic sense for either side to pay a lawyer enough to do a thorough non-schlocky job as opposed to cutting-and-pasting some filings from a prior case, changing the names and dollar amounts, and hoping it's good enough. I personally avoid working on disputes like that because I generally don't want to work for clients for whom it is not economically rational to pay me to do a thorough, thoughtful, and non-schlocky job. But it's a systemic problem that we have a huge number of low-stakes disputes where it's not economically rational for them to be handled competently. Some of us lawyers try to mitigate this by spending some fraction of our time representing clients for free out of a sense of noblesse oblige. But it's usually easier in that context to just represent a convicted murderer (something I myself have done on several occasions) than to represent one or another side in a low-stakes landlord-tenant dispute.
At some level, I expect the judge here understood full well that these cases attract low-paid lawyers handling a large inventory of seemingly-fungible files on a bottom-feeder/commodity basis, and how hard you zing them for improperly cutting corners ought to take that into account. I'm not saying that's ideal, and it would be easy to write a high-minded speech to wet-behind-the-ears law students about how your ethical duty not to submit fictitious bullshit to the court is the same regardless of whether you're being paid $5K or $500K to deal with the case. But I would also want a lawyer who got paid $500K and still did this sort of bullshit to be sanctioned a lot harder.
Benjamin Ernest Orsatti said,
October 19, 2023 @ 8:28 am
This is important:
J.W. Brewer said,
"[I]t's a systemic problem that we have a huge number of low-stakes disputes where it's not economically rational for them to be handled competently."
Let me unpack this for the non-lawyers. You represent a landlord who has people overstaying their rent. Every month that goes by is a month where your client is not collecting rent. Landlord hires you to send the 60-day notice and draft the eviction pleadings (a standard form, usually submitted electronically). Then, you show up at the district magistrate's office for a "cattle call", which means you sit around and watch about 1/2 a roomful of other landlord-tenant (LT) cases, speeding tickets, summary criminal charges, etc., and then you're called, usually the other side doesn't show up, and you get your default judgment.
You're either paid a flat rate, which means that you run the risk of working for an ever-diminishing effective hourly rate the more time you spend on any particular case, or you bill the client hourly, in which case you run the risk of the client getting "sticker shock" if your hours are too high in proportion to the value received (i.e., recovered rent and newly-rentable property).
All that to say, you're going to want to "streamline" your process as much as possible in either case, whether it's a flat-fee or hourly arrangement. Before AI, lawyers used to get "dinged" for re-using old pleadings with incorrect information. Paragraph 20 of your Petition would refer to a "vacant lot", for example, where the subject property is actually a duplex. Inadvertent mistake, no judge is going to bring the gavel down all that hard. Take out the stuff from your re-used pleading, file an amended pleading, no harm done.
But "faking" entire sections of text with AI nonsense and not reading the cases you cite is (here comes the "high-minded speech to wet-behind-the-ears law students about how your ethical duty not to submit fictitious bullshit to the court is the same regardless of whether you're being paid 5k or 500K to deal with the case") a violation of pretty much every state's Rules of Professional Responsibility (citation needed). When you sign your name in that signature box under your Bar License number, you're telling the supreme court of your state, the court that gave you your law license after you swore to uphold the Constitution and be an "officer of the court", that your signature means that you've read the thing you've signed and that it's non-frivolous, meaning that you've checked out the facts as much as you can under the circumstances and that the law you've cited is correct. /soapbox.
But it doesn't even make sense to cut corners this way from an _economic_ standpoint. In other words, the natural fluctuation in billable hours occasioned by being the first called in the "cattle call" at 10:00 a.m. to being the last called at 3:00 p.m. eats up by at least an order of magnitude the time spent to give a shit (legal term) and hop onto Lexis or Westlaw FOR 0.2 BILLABLE HOURS TO LOOKUP A SIMPLE LT CASE!
AntC said,
October 21, 2023 @ 4:52 pm
@BEO Let me unpack this for the non-lawyers. …
Speaking as a non-lawyer, but somebody very familiar professionally with the pressure for billable hours this sounds like bwah-bwah bullshit.
When you sign your name in that signature box under your Bar License number, you're telling the supreme court of your state, the court that gave you your law license after you swore to uphold the Constitution and be an "officer of the court", that your signature means that you've read the thing you've signed and that it's non-frivolous,
Similarly when any sort of professional puts their name to a document, they have a duty of care (backed by enforceable penalties for negligence). That's what 'professional' means.
you show up at the district magistrate's office for a "cattle call", …
I'm more aware of lawyers double/triple-billing the full waiting time for several unconnected cases appearing at the same cattle call. Get organised: take your laptop; with its internet connection; take a few case files; carry on with deskwork for other cases, whilst waiting. Bill only for the time you actually spend on a specific case.
Lawyers get no sympathy from me for the sharp practice you're describing.
(As a professional I've needed to spend considerable time pointing out to a lawyer all the inapplicable clauses they've copy-pasted into a draft contract. Or rather that their junior has, without adequate supervision from the person who's signature appears at the bottom. No sympathy.)