Years ago, when school teachers assigned book reports about classic literature (do teachers still assign book reports?), in the days before the Internet and Wikipedia, some students found a work-around that spared them the task of reading a novel hundreds of pages long. Instead, they would scare up a copy of a series of nearly 200 comic books called Classics Illustrated, which condensed works such as The Last Days of Pompeii, Moby-Dick, or The Last of the Mohicans into a bite-sized 48 pages -- most of which were pictures. They would then use that version to write their reports.
An amusing variation on this was depicted in the final season of the television series Leave it to Beaver, when "Beaver" Cleaver is assigned to read Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers for -- once again -- a book report. He had barely started the book the night before the report was due, and so he tried a different shortcut: watching a 1939 movie version of Musketeers starring Don Ameche and the Ritz Brothers. Unfortunately for The Beav, that movie had turned Dumas' classic into a musical farce -- resulting in predictable (if amusing) consequences for The Beaver and his report.
Those tales of cutting corners came back to me recently with news reports about a New York attorney, Steven A. Schwartz, whose firm filed a newsworthy brief in a federal lawsuit. Schwartz represented a Colombian man suing Colombia's national airline, Avianca, because he claimed that a flight attendant had hit him in the knee with a serving cart.
The airline filed a motion asking the judge to dismiss the case. Schwartz filed a 10-page response arguing that the judge should not dismiss the case, replete with citations to court cases. The attorneys for the airline were then entitled to file what is known as a "reply brief" -- to respond to the legal citations and argument in Schwartz' brief. But they quickly discovered that they could not find most, if any, of the cases that Schwartz' brief cited, either by using the book-and-page citations his brief provided, nor by looking for them by searching for the names of the parties in the cases' titles.
So their response pointed out to the judge that Schwartz' brief seemed to be mostly citations to precedent that didn't exist. One of Schwartz' arguments included a lengthy quotation from one of the cases cited in his brief. While that quotation supported the position he was taking -- not to dismiss the case -- they could find no evidence that the case nor the quotation existed.
As Rick Perry once famously said, "Oops."
Schwartz filed an affidavit with the court admitting that he was not exactly the . . . author? . . . of these questionable passages in the brief. Instead, he, too, had taken a little shortcut -- by having the artificial intelligence program, ChatGPT, "supplement" his research for him.
This isn't exactly unheard of. Attorneys have long had non-attorney legal assistants, or even junior attorneys, create first drafts for them. Each justice on the U.S. Supreme Court has three or four law clerks who likewise prepare drafts of court opinions, as do many judges.
But the whole idea is that the draft is supposed to be just that: A draft. If it goes out under your signature, you're supposed to read it and check the work to make sure that it's accurate. And if, for example, you're "borrowing" a chunk of research from, say, an earlier brief, you need to check the citations to make sure that, for example, the cases are still good law.
Now, Schwartz says that he did check the citations. He asked ChatGPT if the cases it cited in the brief were real. ChatGPT responded that they were . . . which, in retrospect, might not have been the most objective source he could have chosen.
Call it, "Oops Squared."
The judge in the case was not amused, and has set a hearing on June 8 to decide whether this warrants sanctions of some kind -- or if having this embarrassing episode spread throughout the land is punishment enough. Schwartz has practiced for 30 years, which either means he should have known better, or perhaps is entitled to one (huge) mistake.
Back in the 1950s -- also, as I recall, when there was a TV series called "Leave it to Beaver" -- an early computer was asked to use a pantograph arm to build a pyramid with blocks. And it did . . . except that it made one small error: it started building the pyramid at the top. Predictably, all that it created was a pile of scattered blocks on the floor.
That's not a bad analogy to what happened to Mr. Schwartz (and his client) here.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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