Recently, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida suspended attorney Thomas Grant Neusom from practicing in that court for one year over allegations of filing cases that were “completely fabricated”. This action highlights growing concerns about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal processes, following reports of AI applications generating citations believed to be “hallucinated”.
Only weeks ago, the topic of AI-hallucinated citations in court filings was brought into the limelight when two separate incidents led to sanctions as reported. Now, this case has heightened the debate around responsible use of AI in the legal profession.
The court ordered the suspension, after adopting the report and recommendation of its grievance committee. The committee discovered that Neusom had violated the court’s rules and Florida’s Rules of Professional Conduct through various actions. These violations included the filing of pleadings which contained frivolous legal arguments based on artificial cases.
The disciplinary committee was alerted to the matter by Neusom’s opposing counsel, Nabil Joseph, who was unable to locate the cited cases. Joseph had asked Neusom for text versions of the cases, however, he reportedly received “non-responsive and evasive answers”. When asked about the dubious pleadings, Neusom admitted that he might have used AI to draft them but could not verify the excerpts and citations.
The grievance committee concluded that Neusom had failed to perform the required reasonable due diligenceas an attorney, and his behavior went “beyond a lack of due diligence as some of his legal authorities were completely fabricated”. The committee further stated, “artificial intelligence is becoming a new tool for legal research, it can never take the place of an attorney’s responsibility to conduct reasonable diligence and provide accurate legal authority to the Court that supports a valid legal argument”.
With the committee’s recommendations on the table, Senior U.S. District Judge John E. Steele made the final call on March 8, ruling for Neusom to be suspended from his practice in the court for a year.
For more details, refer to the original article.