AI hallucinated case law in insurance company's filings in L.A. County house fire dispute
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Set us as preferred Attorneys for State Farm apologized to a court for submitting legal briefings rife with artificial intelligence hallucinations and nonexistent case law, the latest example of lawyers bolstering their arguments with precedents made up by a chatbot.As part of an insurance dispute over a fire-damaged Carson home, attorneys for State Farm cited several cases in court filings this month that they later acknowledged don’t exist.To support their point that every insurance claim must be “adjudicated on its own unique facts,” the insurance company’s attorneys cited a California Supreme Court decision involving Pacific Gas & Electric allegedly handed down in 1996.
California Residents of Val Verde, a tiny town north of Los Angeles, claim Downtown LA Law Group used a cowboy recruiter to find plaintiffs for lawsuits against a local landfill.The firm denied the allegations and said a rival lawyer was trying to eliminate competition.To buttress their argument that an expert cannot be used as a back channel for “inadmissible hearsay,” they pointed to a nonexistent 2021 case brought by the government.An imagined 2014 case involving State Farm was cited to convince a judge that the company was, ultimately, not responsible for covering all the damage to the plaintiff’s home.“I am deeply apologetic for the above-mentioned submissions and my serious lapse in professional judgment,” Jacquelene Robinson, an attorney with Musick, Peeler & Garrett, the outside counsel representing State Farm, wrote in an Aug.
11 motion.“As such, I accept responsibility for those inexcusable errors, and offer no excuse, only an apology.”The blunder was first caught by attorney Michael Shaolian, who sued State Farm in 2024 for alleged bad-faith handling of the insurance claim of Fa’alagilagi Meni-Silga, a Carson wom...