The Colorado Supreme Court suspended a lawyer for 90 days for his use of Chat GPT in composing a brief which contained fictitious caselaw. The lawyer asked Chat GPT to compose a brief. Chat GPT made up the case citations completely. The lawyer presented the brief in court before eventually revealing the problem to his supervising attorney and the Court. The disciplinary notice reads as follows:
People v. Zachariah C. Crabill. 23PDJ067. November 22, 2023.
“The Presiding Disciplinary Judge approved the parties’ stipulation to discipline and suspended Zachariah C. Crabill (attorney registration number 56783) for one year and one day, with ninety days to be served and the remainder to bestayed upon Crabill’s successful completion of a two- year period of probation, with conditions. The suspension took effect November 22, 2023.
In April 2023, a client hired Crabill to prepare a motion to set aside judgment in the client’s civil case. Crabill, who had never drafted such a motion before working on his client’s matter, cited case law that he found through the artificial intelligence platform, ChatGPT. Crabill did not read the cases he found through ChatGPT or otherwise attempt to verify that the citations were accurate. In May 2023, Crabill filed the motion with the presiding court. Before a hearing on the motion, Crabill discovered that the cases from ChatGPT were either incorrect or fictitious. But Crabill did not alert the court to the sham cases at the hearing. Nor did he withdraw the motion. When the judge expressed concerns about the accuracy of the cases, Crabill falsely attributed the mistakes to a legal intern. Six days after the hearing, Crabill filed an affidavit with the court, explaining that he used ChatGPT when he drafted the motion.
Through this conduct, Crabill violated Colo. RPC 1.1 (a lawyer must competently represent a client); Colo. RPC 1.3 (a lawyer must act with reasonable diligence and promptness when representing a client); Colo. RPC 3.3(a)(1) (a lawyer must not knowingly make a false statement of material fact or law to a tribunal); and Colo. RPC 8.4(c) (it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation).”
My comments: This case has been widely reported in the press. It is unfortunate the attorney trusted the software to write a brief for him, but then failed to check the case citations. Software can be corrected quickly so that it does not repeat the error. Human beings, on the other hand, are prone to repeat these types of errors. As an associate it was drummed into me to check the case citations and check Shepards. This can all be done online now.
Ed Clinton, Jr.
Legal Ethics Lawyer 