Bruce Green, director of Fordham Law’s Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics, clarifies to Bloomberg Law whether judges can face sanctions for the kind of errors they find in lawyers’ work.
Several lawyers have made news for AI-generated case citations that turned out to be false. Two Manhattan lawyers in 2023 were fined $5,000 for filing a ChatGPT-generated court brief. Last month, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth District of Texas imposed a $2,500 sanction against a lawyer for submitting a brief that cited non-existent cases.
“The use of AI or other technology does not excuse carelessness or failure to follow professional standards,” the panel of judges wrote.
Bruce Green, a legal ethics professor at Fordham Law School, noted that judges, too, can face sanctions for the kind of errors they find in lawyers’ work. Discipline rules state that a judge shall perform judicial and administrative duties competently and diligently, according to Green.
Read “Judge Scraps Opinion After Lawyer Flags Made-Up Quotes” in Bloomberg Law.