'Revolution'

• Author: Savanna Shuntich
• Pages: 6-7

Published in Litigation, Volume 50, Number 2, Winter 2024. © 2024 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not

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HEADNOTES

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“Revolution”

SAVANNA SHUNTICH

The author is an associate with Fortney Scott in

Washington, D.C.

At my firm, we advise employers on the

use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the

workplace. We spend our days thinking

about whether AI hiring tools will create

liability for discrimination and predicting

how the regulatory landscape will evolve.

But if I am being honest, I also spend a

great deal of time, primarily in the middle

of the night, thinking about what effect AI

will have on my job and my profession. I

would be surprised if many other practi-

tioners were not having the same middle-

of-the-night crisis of the soul. From my

perspective, the evolution of AI is in the

early stages, but many of its shortcomings

are likely to be remedied well within my

lifetime, rendering many lawyers obso-

lete. Some have likened the emergence

of ChatGPT and other new generative

AI products to the advent of the printing

press or the Industrial Revolution. In my

darker moments, I would compare them

to the creation of the atomic bomb, a sen -

timent evidently shared by Warren Buffet,

who proclaimed as much at the most recent

annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway.

For the moment, there is reason to be

optimistic about the continued place for

human lawyers in our legal system. On

May 4, in a personal injury case called

Mata v. Avianca, Inc. in the Southern

District of New York, the judge issued an

order to show cause to the plaintiff’s attor

-

ney as to why he should not be sanctioned.

The attorney had filed an opposition brief

to a motion to dismiss that cited to a se-

ries of fake cases favorable to his client.

The plaintiff’s lawyer even provided the

court with a partial copy of a ruling from

the Eleventh Circuit that was cited in the

brief. This precipitated a bizarre turn of

events in which the Southern Distri ct had

to contact the Eleventh Circuit to affirma-

tively determine that the case was fake,

after being unable to find any reference

to the case on Westlaw and Lexis.

I’ll cut to the chase here: One of the

plaintiff’s lawyers conducted research

on ChatGPT, even going so far as to ask

ChatGPT if the cases it was citing were

fake, and received the response that the

cases were “real and can be found in repu-

table legal databases such as LexisNexis

and Westlaw.” This is what we now call a

hallucination, where the AI chatbot made

up something that sounded convincing.

I must admit I reviewed the opposition

Headnotes illustrations by Kathleen Fu