U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin said he rejected a magistrate judge's recommendation to impose a $5,000 sanction against Kathryn Curry of GCA Law Partners LLP and refer her to the court's executive committee because he believes Curry was telling the truth when she explained the mistake happened during a "teaching moment" with her eighth-grade daughter about the dangers of using artificial intelligence as they worked from her office one weekend.
Sanctions related to AI-use have generally applied in instances where attorneys intentionally use it and include those results in a document they later file as part of an effort to replace genuine legal research, Judge Durkin said. "That wasn't what happened here," he said.
"These facts are so unusual they couldn't have been made up," Judge Durkin said. "It just reflects life."
Curry told Law360 after the hearing that she was thankful Judge Durkin took the time to consider her objection and further explain her side of the issue "because it's the truth."
When U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria Valdez was reviewing the matter, Curry "didn't know she was looking at things suspiciously," and would have presented additional information to her that would have been clearer. "So, I appreciate having the opportunity to [present that information] to Judge Durkin," she said.
"Things go wrong because of a series of events, and I wish I could have changed any of them than having to deal with this," Curry said. "It's been really, really hard because I do take my reputation very seriously."
Curry had offered the same explanation to Judge Valdez months earlier, asserting the lesson came about as her eighth-grade daughter was with her writing essays for a high school application. Curry explained to the court that she'd inserted the hallucinated Seventh Circuit citation into her brief and later corrected it, but never saved it, and thus accidentally sent the incorrect version along to be filed.
Curry told the court she'd followed typical California procedure and filed an errata sheet on the docket immediately after her local counsel, which had just replaced Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP in the case, flagged his inability to locate two cases mentioned in the brief. The circumstances surrounding Willkie's departure fueled much of Judge Valdez's suspicion over Curry's "tale," but the judge also said the attorney didn't need to insert the hallucinated passage into her brief for the lesson at hand to still be complete.
On Tuesday, however, Judge Durkin noted he was able to review the situation with a deeper explanation from several additional affidavits and other pieces of evidence the magistrate judge did not have before issuing her sanction recommendation.
Judge Valdez seemed concerned that Curry was lying about how and when she realized she'd submitted the incorrect brief, and she seemed suspicious that the timing of Willkie's departure from the case was related to the issues with her brief. "That's not an unreasonable conclusion ... given the information she had," Judge Durkin said.
But Curry's objection and additional evidence show Willkie exited the case for unrelated fee reasons, and that it was Curry's new local counsel who flagged the brief's citation issue, he said. The evidence shows, as Curry asserted again Tuesday, that Willkie was not involved in preparing the brief at issue and had engaged in no meaningful communication about the document either before or after it was filed, he said.
Judge Durkin also said he took no issue with Curry's approach to flagging the issue, as filing an errata seemed "as good a way of notifying both the court and counsel that there were issues with the brief" as any other process available to her.
Counsel for defendant Life Fitness, which had been accused of violating certain copyrights related to certain activity courses that plaintiff Nextpulse had contracted for showing on Life Fitness' exercise equipment screens, did not agree with Curry's sanction objection. But their client most importantly "did not really suffer any prejudice" because of the brief at issue, Judge Durkin said.
Curry has also now had to travel to Chicago twice to answer for her actions, and her client "thankfully" has not changed his opinion of her, he said. All of those circumstances warrant deciding against a monetary sanction, Judge Durkin said.
Counsel for Life Fitness declined to comment on Tuesday.
Nextpulse is represented by Kathryn Curry of GCA Law Partners LLP and Mark Bagley of Tolpin & Partners PC.
Life Fitness is represented by Jason Keener, Joseph Marinelli, Victoria Hanson, Katherine Schelli, Emad Mahou and Suet Lee of Irwin IP LLP.
The case is Nextpulse LLC v. Life Fitness LLC, case number 1:22-cv-03239, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
--Editing by Dave Trumbore.
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