Source: Reuters
A federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday chided a law firm for citing results generated by an artificial intelligence program to help justify its bid for attorney fees in a case against New York City’s Department of Education.
Lawyers at the Cuddy Law Firm had told U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer in a court filing that they used feedback from OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a “cross-check” to back up other billing rate data included in their fee request, which stemmed from their work securing educational resources for a learning-disabled student.
Engelmayer in Thursday’s ruling, opens new tab noted that other lawyers have been sanctioned or admonished for inadvertently including fictitious case citations generated by new AI tools like ChatGPT in legal briefs. In this case, in contrast, the lawyers explicitly cited their use of AI for research.
“It suffices to say that the Cuddy Law Firm’s invocation of ChatGPT as support for its aggressive fee bid is utterly and unusually unpersuasive,” the judge said. “As the firm should have appreciated, treating ChatGPT’s conclusions as a useful gauge of the reasonable billing rate for the work of a lawyer with a particular background carrying out a bespoke assignment for a client in a niche practice area was misbegotten at the jump.”
Benjamin Kopp of the Cuddy firm in a Thursday email pointed to earlier filings in the case, in which Kopp said he queried ChatGPT about rates that clients might expect to pay and questions clients could ask about how case-specific factors could affect rates and fees. “The underlying assertion was not about ChatGPT’s correctness on rates, but rather, what parents would expect as consumers,” he said in the email.
Read full article: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/ny-judge-criticizes-law-firm-citing-chatgpt-attorney-fee-bid-2024-02-22/
