Butler Snow said in a filing on Monday that it "sincerely apologizes to the court, all parties, and counsel of record for what has taken place here," but asked the court to "limit any sanctions it may impose to a modest sanction upon it and to the exclusion of the affected clients in this litigation."
The fake citations at issue were made in filings Butler Snow submitted to the court in May related to former Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jefferson Dunn's bid to depose plaintiff Frankie Johnson in connection with a lawsuit he filed over conditions at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Alabama.
In an order last month, U.S. District Judge Anna M. Manasco directed Butler Snow to appear at a hearing and show cause why it shouldn't be sanctioned for the fake case citations, which were flagged by counsel for Johnson in a May filing.
After Johnson's attorneys raised questions about the fake case citations, the court did its own "independent searches for each allegedly fabricated citation, to no avail," the judge's order said. She asked the Butler Snow attorneys representing Dunn to show why they shouldn't be sanctioned "for making false statements of fact or law to the court."
At the hearing on the order to show cause on May 21, Judge Manasco gave parties until Monday to make supplemental filings. The judge also allowed Butler Snow to file corrected versions of the two filings at issue, which it did on May 23.
In Monday's filing, the firm said it "has undertaken an extensive review of all filings in all Alabama federal courts and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on or after April 1, 2023, where counsel of record from this case … appeared on any filing."
It said it also retained Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP "to independently conduct its own review using its own independent protocols."
"In all, Morgan Lewis reviewed more than 2,400 separate legal citations across 330 filings," the filing said, and "did not find any instance where a legal citation was fabricated or where the citations were comparable to what prompted the Show Cause Orders."
"No additional apparent AI-generated 'hallucination' was uncovered," Butler Snow said, adding: "In sum, the results of these investigations, coupled with the declarations of counsel, indicate that this was an isolated event."
In a filing last month, Johnson's counsel flagged multiple case citations in a motion for leave to depose an incarcerated person and a motion to compel that were filed by Dunn.
Dunn "appears to have wholly invented case citations in his Motion for Leave, possibly through the use of generative artificial intelligence," Johnson's filing said.
In one of the problematic citations, a real case was referenced, but was used to support an argument using a "pincite" that doesn't exist. Instead of being about a discovery issue as Butler Snow's filing suggested, the case related to "an appeal challenging a criminal's sentencing enhancement," Johnson's attorneys said.
In another instance, Butler Snow cited a case that was purportedly from the Northern District of Alabama, but the only case that could be found with that name "was decided by the Alabama Court of Appeals in 1939 regarding the resolution of a speeding ticket," the filing said.
Another citation fabricated a case that doesn't exist, Johnson's counsel said, and it also couldn't find yet another of the cases Butler Snow cited as being from the Northern District of Alabama.
Johnson's counsel also flagged a case citation used in the motion to compel, saying although it "found a string of similarly named opinions, none of them stood for the proposition defendant represented."
"Defendant's complete fabrication of case law is suggestive of an abuse of the utilization of generative artificial intelligence and should be taken very seriously by this Court," Johnson's filing said.
In a filing before the May hearing, Butler Snow was apologetic to the court saying: "What happened here is unacceptable."
"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," the firm said. "Those citations turned out to be 'hallucinations' by the AI system."
The firm added: "Although done without intent to mislead the Court or counsel opposite, counsel do not defend or condone this complete lapse in judgment. They apologize — both for failing to uphold their own standards and for wasting counsel opposite's and this Court's time and resources."
Butler Snow told the court its partner Matthew B. Reeves, who is assistant practice group leader for its constitutional and civil rights litigation group, used ChatGPT in the preparation of the two filings and failed to catch the false citations.
"Since 2023, Butler Snow has cautioned all attorneys about the risks of large language models (which includes ChatGPT) as a research tool and reinforced the need to verify the accuracy of every citation," the firm told the court. "The firm has an Artificial Intelligence Committee which is currently drafting a new comprehensive artificial intelligence policy."
After the court's show cause order, the firm also "sent an additional reminder to all" of its attorneys "about their ethical and professional duties to verify the accuracy of all citations or other authority presented to any court," the filing said.
The firm said it "will also hold extensive new training for the entire firm regarding the appropriate and inappropriate uses of artificial intelligence in legal representation."
In an amended version of his suit filed in 2023, Johnson accused Dunn and corrections officers of allowing "patently unsafe" conditions at the Donaldson correctional facility and said he has "been repeatedly victimized while in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections."
Counsel for the parties didn't immediately respond to requests for comments.
Johnson is represented by Jamila S. Mensah, Kelly A. Potter, Gary Y. Gould of Norton Rose Fulbright, Lana A. Olson and M. Wesley Smithart of Lightfoot Franklin & White LLC and Anil A. Mujumdar of Dagney Johnson Law Group.
Dunn is represented by William R. Lunsford, Matthew B. Reeves, William J. Cranford and Daniel J. Chism of Butler Snow LLP.
In response to the order to show cause, Butler Snow is represented in-house by A. David Fawal and Michael B. Beers.
The case is Johnson v. Dunn et al., case number 2:21-cv-01701, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
--Editing by Nicole Bleier.
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