The Volokh Conspiracy

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"Thick on Words but Thin on Substance"

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


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.

Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any institution. He is also the co-host of the Free Speech Unmuted podcast.