The lawsuit itself was ordinary. A passenger said a metal serving cart had struck his knee on an Avianca flight from El Salvador to New York, and he sued the airline. Avianca asked the court to throw the case out.
On March 1, 2023, the passenger’s lawyers filed their response. It cited a string of court decisions, with quotes and citations, among them Varghese v. China Southern Airlines.
Avianca’s lawyers went looking for those cases and couldn’t find them. Neither could the judge.
The research had been done by a lawyer at the firm with about 30 years of practice. The firm’s research service had limited access to federal cases, so he had turned to ChatGPT. He later told the court he had heard about a new site that he “falsely assumed was like a super search engine.”
At some point he did try to verify. Screenshots he gave the court show him asking ChatGPT, “Is Varghese a real case,” and whether the other cases it had provided were fake. ChatGPT answered that its authorities were real and could be found on Westlaw and LexisNexis.
They could not. Six of the decisions had been generated by ChatGPT and did not exist. The judge described the fake Varghese opinion’s legal analysis as “gibberish.” It began as a wrongful death claim and turned, partway through, into a case about a passenger denied boarding on a flight from Bangkok to New York.
The court did not stop at the fake cases. It found that the lawyers had kept standing by them after the airline and the court had questioned whether they existed.
On June 22, 2023, the judge fined the two lawyers and their firm $5,000. His opinion opened by saying there is “nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance.” The problem was elsewhere. Existing rules, he wrote, “impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”