Attorney sanctions in Alabama demonstrate perils of AI

(CN) — As a cautionary tale, retired Justice John G. Browning recalled one of his first experiences with generative artificial intelligence. He had been invited to speak at a technology conference in 2023, where the organizers used ChatGPT to write his biography.

“It got a lot of it right — distinguished career on Texas’ Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals or whatever — but when it got to the part about how I died in 2018, I realized ChatGPT was getting some things wrong.”

Browning, who is very much alive and currently an instructor at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law at Faulkner University, has written extensively about technology in the legal industry. More recently he’s delved into the promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence.

“Technology innovation has been something that the legal profession usually reacts with fear and horror and later, you know, grudging acceptance,” he said, noting even operator-dialed telephones were once scrutinized for perceived threats to attorney-clients privilege. The industry has also been leery to adopt email communications, electronic filings and social media, he said. But attorneys also have “a duty of competence” to be cognizant of both the benefits and the risks of relevant technology.

Still, within months of the release of chatbots and other AI tools to wide audiences in 2022, instances of “AI hallucinations” or fabricated citations were entered into the record of courts around the nation. Last summer, Browning published an article detailing five such cases, where attorney reliance on artificial intelligence violated duties of competence, confidentiality, candor to the court and supervision.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Alabama imposed sanctions on three attorneys for submitting court filings containing fabricated legal citations generated by ChatGPT. The false citations were generated by attorneys at Butler Snow LLP and appeared in two motions filed on behalf of defendant Jefferson S. Dunn, the former commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections. In addition to a public reprimand, attorneys Matthew B. Reeves, William J. Cranford and William R. Lunsford were disqualified from further participation in the case and will be referred to the Alabama State Bar for disciplinary proceedings.

“Fabricating legal authority is serious misconduct that demands a serious sanction,” wrote U.S. District Judge Anna M. Manasco, a Donald Trump appointee. “They do not account for the danger that fake citations pose for the fair administration of justice and the integrity of the judicial system."

An investigation determined Reeves used ChatGPT to generate the citations but never checked their accuracy, Cranford “blindly incorporated” Reeves’ edits without verifying the citations and Lunsford, the supervising partner, skimmed the motions but did not scrutinize the legal authorities “despite his ethical duty to do so,” according to the order.

Butler Snow did not immediately return a request for comment, but acknowledged the errors in a brief filed in the case. The firm blamed the incident on AI “hallucinations” and said a broader investigation determined it was an “isolated event” within the national law firm that has more than 400 attorneys.

Melissa J. Warnke, a spokesperson for the Alabama State Bar, said a lawyer who submits false information, whether intentionally, negligently or even accidentally, could receive professional punishment.

“A lawyer has an obligation to make sure that all facts and legal authority they cite to the court are accurate,” Warnke said when asked about the incident. “When misstatements are made, a lawyer will be more culpable if he or she is the one who did the legal research (or failed to adequately do the research) that resulted in the inaccurate information being submitted to the court. A lawyer will be less culpable, thus less likely to receive punishment, if he or she reasonably relied on their client for information and it turned out that the information was false.  The lawyer is rarely a witness to facts that are submitted to the court, thus less likely to know if they are true. That is not the case when submitting legal citations to the court. A lawyer should not rely solely on artificial intelligence to meet his or her obligation of truthfulness and candor toward the court.”

Since 2021, Butler Snow and Lunsford have been paid more than $40 million in public funds from the state of Alabama, including more than $14 million in fiscal year 2025. Lunsford and the firm are lead litigators for the embattled Department of Corrections, which has been targeted for federal takeover due to the derelict state of prison facilities and inhumane living conditions for inmates.

The state has worked with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve the issues and in October 2021, the Legislature approved more than $1 billion for the construction of a new prison.

Despite the early errors in the technology, Browning believes AI will be a boon for the profession.

“Lawyers who refuse to adapt to technology run the risk of making themselves replaceable,” he said, adding that doesn’t mean there will be robot lawyers and judges any time soon. “Generative AI makes it possible to free up lawyers from many of the more mundane tasks, but the danger we’re seeing is you’ve got to keep the human in the loop. Nothing is perfect, and lawyers, with our ethical obligations, can’t presume that any output is perfect.”

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