"Thick on Words but Thin on Substance"

More from the transcript of a hearing in Flycatcher Corp. Ltd. v. Affable Avenue LLC:

And the lawyer's response:

The court's reaction to Mr. Feldman's "confusing justification":

In short, Mr. Feldman acknowledged ending up with citations that "did not exist," but failed to provide a coherent explanation as to how. Was the error a product of AI hallucination from the initial drafting stage? Was it somehow a case name mismatch on Google Scholar (setting aside the greater importance of the reporter citation)? Did another case improperly cite Mr. Feldman's case, accidentally supplying him the wrong citation? Did an AI program introduce errors at the cite-check stage where none had existed previously? Representative of much of his colloquy with the Court, Mr. Feldman's explanations were thick on words but thin on substance.

For more on what happened in the case, see the post below, Lawyer's Repeated Filings with AI Hallucinations Lead to Default Judgment Against Client.

Comments

[Bubba Jones]

I have an operational question.

Has it always been routine to check all the citations, or is this a recent thing that lawyers have discovered is an easy way to discredit the opposition?

These lawyers seem like people who would have routinely made copy/paste errors, so what is different now? Is it the sheer volume of errors? Have courts become less tolerant?

[apedad]

I think it's more of the present rise of AI.

Previously all sources were (mostly) legit, or could be traced back to a legit source.

AI just makes up shit.

[Bored Lawyer]

Agreed. The problem was always there, but AI magnified it tremendously.

[KenveeB]

I don't cite check as a matter of course, but if the defense is relying on particular cases that I don't know, I'll look the case up so I can respond to it appropriately. If one case is bad, you look a little more at everything else.

[SRG2]

I asked Deepseek to rewrite the opening of Genesis in the same style as Mr Feldman's response:

In the beginning, it wasn't -- a beginning that I observed, I would not rely on observation when I was first establishing the heavens and the earth. So if I referenced a light that governed the day, that referenced a greater light, I may have referenced a light that was not -- I may have spoken of, not created, but I spoke of that light. When I went to separate the light from the darkness, I mistakenly used a firmament that did -- that, one, the firmament did not hold, and two, the firmament that I used was not the same separation.

And the earth was without form, and void, a void that I had referred to, but not a void I had cited. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, a deepness that was cited from another deepness. And I moved upon the face of the waters, saying, Let there be light. But the light that appeared was not the -- the light that I cited. I may have referred to it, but the citation for "day" and the citation for "night" were not the same citations.

And I saw the light, that it was good. But the goodness was a reference to a prior goodness, a goodness from a case I was not directly citing. So I divided the light from the darkness, calling the light Day, and the darkness I called Night. And the evening and the morning were a first day, but the sequence, one, the sequence did not exist in the original record, and two, the sequence that I used was not the same sequence.

I think this is fucking hilarious

[Stupid Government Tricks]

I agree, that is some world class rubbish, full of verbs and nouns and adjectives, signifying nothing.

[Roger S]

It is often the case that mistakes are hard to explain. If you ask me how my car keys ended up in my shoe, I may not be able to explain it.