Today, judges are increasingly drawing the same scrutiny, and Browning told Ars he thinks it’s “frighteningly likely that we will see more cases” like the Georgia divorce dispute, in which “a trial court unwittingly incorporates bogus case citations that an attorney includes in a proposed order” or even potentially in “proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law.”
“I can envision such a scenario in any number of situations in which a trial judge maintains a heavy docket and looks to counsel to work cooperatively in submitting proposed orders, including not just family law cases but other civil and even criminal matters,” Browning told Ars.
According to reporting from the National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit representing court leaders and professionals who are advocating for better judicial resources, AI tools like ChatGPT have made it easier for high-volume filers and unrepresented litigants who can’t afford attorneys to file more cases, potentially further bogging down courts.
Peter Henderson, a researcher who runs the Princeton Language+Law, Artificial Intelligence, & Society (POLARIS) Lab, told Ars that he expects cases like the Georgia divorce dispute aren’t happening every day just yet.
It’s likely that a “few hallucinated citations go overlooked” because generally, fake cases are flagged through “the adversarial nature of the US legal system,” he suggested. Browning further noted that trial judges are generally “very diligent in spotting when a lawyer is citing questionable authority or misleading the court about what a real case actually said or stood for.”
Henderson agreed with Browning that “in courts with much higher case loads and less adversarial process, this may happen more often.” But Henderson noted that the appeals court catching the fake cases is an example of the adversarial process working.
While that’s true in this case, it seems likely that anyone exhausted by the divorce legal process, for example, may not pursue an appeal if they don’t have energy or resources to discover and overturn errant orders.