Highlights
- Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 requires attorneys to verify the accuracy of court filings — including those prepared or supplemented with AI tools.
- All outputs from AI used in legal research must be closely scrutinized to ensure their accuracy.
- Failure to verify AI outputs used in court filings can lead to monetary or other sanctions.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado has sanctioned two attorneys for submitting a brief containing “nearly thirty defective citations” that were generated by artificial intelligence.
According to the court, the brief:
- Misquoted cited cases
- Misstated the holdings of cited cases
- Cited cases for legal principles not discussed in those cases
- Misidentified the court that issued the cited case
- Cited non-existent cases
Following submission of the offending brief, the court issued an order to show cause as to why the attorneys should not be sanctioned. In their response, the attorneys advanced several arguments in an attempt to demonstrate their diligence in preparing the offending brief.
They claimed that while the brief was initially drafted without the use of AI, they later employed a legal research AI tool to identify additional or stronger authority to support their arguments. The attorneys argued that they went through the final brief, which included the outputs from the AI tool, to conduct a thorough citation check.
Yet, the version of the brief that was filed still contained numerous issues, likely caused by the use of the AI tool. The attorneys blamed human error for these issues — they inadvertently filed a prior version of the brief rather than the final version that was fully cite-checked. The court held that the “correct” version by counsel still contained similar errors — including references to non-existent cases and misidentified courts — and was “replete with the same errors” as the filed version.
The court took issue with the apparent contradictions in the attorneys’ arguments. On the one hand, the attorneys stated that they did not “rel[y] on AI legal research and had prepared a thoroughly cite-checked final document.” On the other hand, the attorneys stated that they had used an AI tool to supplement their legal research.
The court also took judicial notice that the attorneys had submitted briefs with similar false citations in a different case around the same time that the filings at issue in this case were submitted. The court held that the repetition of these errors in multiple cases demonstrates counsel’s practice of utilizing AI to conduct legal research without verifying the outputs of the AI model.
In its opinion, the court emphasized that the use of AI is governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, which requires certification that any filed materials are “warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending…existing law.” It is the obligation of the attorney submitting any filing to ensure the accuracy of the submission.
In considering an appropriate sanction, the court weighed the purposes of sanctions under Rule 11:
- Deterring future litigation abuse
- Punishing present litigation abuse
- Compensating victims of litigation abuse
- Streamlining court dockets and facilitating case management
Under these principles, the court imposed a $3,000 sanction against both attorneys who signed the offending brief, payable to the district court.
Conclusion
While AI tools can assist in conducting legal research, outputs from AI tools must be thoroughly verified. To comply with the requirements of candor and accuracy imposed by Rule 11, any court submission should be reviewed for accuracy. If not, attorneys run the risk of incurring personal sanctions or sanctions against their client.