Butler Snow, a law firm defending the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) in multiple lawsuits, told an Alabama judge on Monday that its submission of a court filing generated by an artificial intelligence chatbot was an “isolated incident.”
Matthew Reeves, a Butler Snow partner, apologized to Northern District of Alabama U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco after it included case citations generated by ChatGPT in two court filings, according to Reuters.
Manasco has ordered attorneys involved in the filing to show why the firm shouldn’t be sanctioned for the error.
David Fawal, of counsel for Butler Snow, said in a filing on Monday, “Since the Court’s Show Cause hearing on May 21, 2025, Butler Snow 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, 2023,1 where counsel of record from this case, and also Lynette Potter, appeared on any filing. See Ex. 1, Declaration of Benjamin M. Watson. In each docket, Butler Snow’s team pulled all filings and reviewed all citations to determine if there were any apparent AI-generated “hallucinations,” i.e., a false citation where a) the cited source does not exist, or b) the legal proposition appeared to have been invented by artificial intelligence (as distinguished from likely human error). In total, the Butler Snow team reviewed 52 Alabama federal court dockets; of those, 40 dockets contained substantive citations for review. See id. Butler Snow attorneys examined every citation in those 40 dockets and did not find any additional apparent AI-generated “hallucinations.”
“In addition to its review, Butler Snow also engaged an outside law firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP (“Morgan Lewis”), to independently conduct its own review2 using its own independent protocols. Id. at ¶ 4. Morgan Lewis used a team including 28 attorneys to verify all citations in those same 40 dockets in Alabama federal courts and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. See Ex. 2, Declaration of Scott A. Milner, ¶¶ 13–18. In all, Morgan Lewis reviewed more than 2,400 separate legal citations across 330 filings. See id. at ¶ 35. Morgan Lewis did not find any instance where a legal citation was fabricated or where the citations were comparable to what prompted the Show Cause Orders, i.e., a citation to a source that was legitimate but did not stand for the proposition for which it was cited. No additional apparent AI-generated “hallucination” was uncovered,” he added in the filing.
Fawal continued, “Counsel of record in this case submit with this filing declarations stating that they have never used any publicly accessible, generative artificial intelligence chatbot, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to generate legal or other authority citations for submission to any court (except, with respect to the Declaration of Matthew B. Reeves, in the instances already known to the Court and subject to the Order to Show Cause). See Exs. 3-7, Declarations of William R. Lunsford; Matthew B. Reeves; William J. Cranford, III; Daniel Chism; and Lynette Potter.3 In sum, the results of these investigations, coupled with the declarations of counsel, indicate that this was an isolated event.”
“The two instances subject to the Order to Show Cause appear to be the only instances of AI-generated hallucinations submitted by counsel of record to this or any other Alabama federal court. Butler Snow says this not to minimize what has taken place in this case, but to provide assurance to the Court. As demonstrated in Butler Snow’s original filing, and at the show cause hearing, this was not a situation where Butler Snow did not have procedures or policies in place warning its attorneys of the dangers of AI. Instead, here, despite Butler Snow’s policies and procedures, a single attorney failed to follow those policies and procedures and used unverified AI on the two filings in question. In addition to reviewing what has happened in the past, Butler Snow has taken and is taking affirmative steps to ensure that this will not happen again in the future. The firm has begun the process of implementing the revised policies and procedures previously described to the Court. See Doc. 195-1. In addition, Matthew B. Reeves is, in conjunction with Plaintiff’s counsel and law school professor Anil Mujumdar, engaging in efforts to educate law students regarding the risks and repercussions of the use of AI in legal practice to help deter such conduct by others,” Fawal said.
Show Cause Hearing Butlers Now by Caleb Taylor on Scribd
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