May. 20, 2025

Monday was mea culpa day for the high-dollar group of lawyers in Huntsville who were caught using generative AI – badly – to cite sources that did not exist or did not say the things they claimed in court filings.

Call it AI culpa.

“What happened here is unacceptable,” the law firm Butler Snow said in a filing. “Tempted by the convenience of artificial intelligence, counsel improperly used generative AI to supplement two motions and did not verify the citations that AI provided. Those citations turned out to be ‘hallucinations’ by the AI system.”

Which is a dangerous thing, perhaps tantamount -- as the judge suggested -- to making false statements to the court.

U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco, in a blistering filing Friday, demanded responses from the firm and four of its lawyers who signed off on the citations: Bill Lunsford; Matthew B. Reeves; William J. Cranford and Daniel Chism.

They responded in writing Monday, individually and as a firm, begging the court for forgiveness and rolling Reeves under the bus.

The firm said Cranford prepared the draft and sent it to Reeves, a partner and assistant leader of the firm’s Constitutional and Civil Rights Litigation group. Reeves then revised it, using ChatGPT that “added false legal authorities.”

Reeves, in a separate filing, fell on his sword.

“I did not intend to mislead the Court or opposing counsel,” he wrote. “I relied on the AI-generated output without confirming that the citations were valid and applicable. That was a serious error in judgment.”

He said he knew generally about ChatGPT, and used it.

“In my haste to finalize the motions and get them filed, I failed to verify the case citations returned by ChatGPT through independent review,” he wrote.

Lunsford is the head of the litigation group and the most well known of the lawyers. He has been likened to a government agency because of the millions he is paid to defend the state of Alabama and its prisons and leaders. He was paid $23.2 million by the state in the last two years alone — $42 million since 2020 — much of it to defend the prison system and its employees from “complex and intensive” lawsuits.

“I am personally and professionally sorry for what has occurred,” Lunsford wrote. “These events do not reflect the nature or quality of work that I have worked for decades to ensure that every client receives.”

Lunsford went on to say he never reviewed one of the documents in question, and only scanned the other, “given that the document had already undergone a review by Matt Reeves.”

Nevertheless he and Chism, who apparently was in the wrong place at the wrong time, signed the documents claiming them to be true and well researched.

Which of course they weren’t. The lawyers must now wait to see if Manasco finds cause to sanction any or all of them.

At the end of the day everybody on this Butler Snow team took a shortcut that, if not caught by opposing lawyer Jamilah Mensah, could have done legal damage to a guy who has already been done grievous harm in Alabama prisons.

Mensah represents Frankie Johnson, who was stabbed multiple times and on more than one occasion while serving in Alabama prisons. He is suing former prison commissioner Jeff Dunn, claiming the system failed to protect him.

Mensah last week pointed out in a filing that a string of Butler Snow’s citations “appears to have been made up out of whole cloth.”

Props to Mensah for spotting it. But Alabama should not have to depend on a hawk-eyed lawyer for an injured prisoner to catch its mistakes. Justice should never have to depend on such things.

Apologies are good. Mea culpas are good. I guess tossing a teammate under the bus is good, unless you’re that guy.

It’s just not good enough.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5728284&forum_id=2E#48949752)