An AI Fail By An Elite Litigation Firm
With a Vault 100 and Am Law 200 law firm at its center, this might be Biglaw’s biggest artificial-intelligence mishap to date.
Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.
As Andy Warhol is famously credited with saying, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Here’s what I’m wondering: in the future, will everyone be world-famous for 15 minutes… for an AI screw-up?
Why do I say this? AI mistakes are no longer the exclusive province of the wantonly stupid. They can even be committed by leading litigators at famous firms.
Meet John Kucera, a partner in the Los Angeles office of Boies Schiller Flexner, whose firm bio describes him as “a former prosecutor with extensive experience in high profile litigation.” According to his LinkedIn profile, Kucera has been practicing for more than 20 years, including more than 12 years spent as a federal prosecutor in the Central District of California (aka Los Angeles).
As for Boies Schiller Flexner, the firm needs no introduction. Founded in 1997 by the celebrated trial lawyer David Boies after he left Cravath, Swaine & Moore, today BSF is one of the most prestigious and profitable law firms in the nation. It’s currently #55 in the Vault 100, the nation’s 100 most prestigious law firms, and #118 in the Am Law 200, the country’s 200 largest law firms based on revenue. (And BSF has reached even greater heights in the past: it used to be an Am Law 100 firm, and it was #12 in the Vault 100 a decade ago.)
Boies Schiller Flexner is well-known for representing plaintiffs as well as defendants, and some of its plaintiff-side clients are victims—most famously, victims of the late Jeffrey Epstein. So it shouldn’t be surprising that John Kucera and BSF represent victims of the actor Danny Masterson, who was convicted in May 2023 of raping two women. In their civil case—filed in California state court against Masterson, the Church of Scientology (to which Masterson belonged), and Scientology leader David Miscavige—the five plaintiffs claim that after coming forward about Masterson, they “were subjected to a relentless campaign of harassment, surveillance, threats, and defamation, both online and offline.”
The Church of Scientology filed a motion to strike under California’s anti-SLAPP statute. After Judge Upinder Kalra of Los Angeles County Superior Court denied the motion, the Church appealed to the California Court of Appeal for the Second District. Represented by Horvitz & Levy, a highly regarded appellate boutique, and Winston & Strawn, the well-known Biglaw firm, the Church filed its opening brief in April. The plaintiffs, represented by John Kucera and BSF, filed a response brief. Then the Church filed its reply brief, which began as follows:
Before addressing the merits of this appeal in the introduction section below, we wish to draw the court’s attention to the fact that plaintiffs’ brief contains a series of troubling citation errors. The portions of the brief containing errors bear many of the hallmarks of AI-generated case citations. A table detailing the errors we identified is included as Attachment A at the end of this brief….
[M]ultiple sections of plaintiffs’ brief are filled with erroneous citations that mischaracterize holdings and refer to cases on unrelated areas of law. Some cases are mistitled such that it is difficult to determine what cases plaintiffs are intending to cite in the first place. And one case plaintiffs cite is completely made up. At minimum, this court should disregard these sections of plaintiffs’ brief and find the arguments plaintiffs make forfeited.
Yikes—this sounds bad. And it turns out to be true, as Kucera acknowledged in BSF’s motion for leave to file a corrected response brief, which he filed last Friday. Here’s the relevant portion of the declaration submitted by Kucera in support of the motion:
I was and am the sole Firm partner with responsibility for overseeing the preparation and filing of the Filed Response Brief in this action. Under my direction, and with consent of the individual Respondents, the preparation of the Filed Response Brief included the use of artificial intelligence tools. The Firm is committed to the responsible use of artificial intelligence and has adopted policies and implemented trainings intended to protect against the risks of the improper use of artificial intelligence. Independent of the use of artificial intelligence tools, Firm lawyers are always expected to scrupulously proofread and cite check the accuracy of the factual and legal claims in court filings.
Notwithstanding these controls, the Filed Response Brief included material citation errors, including those identified in Appellants’ Reply Brief. As the attorney and partner in charge of the Filed Response Brief, I am embarrassed by and very much regret these errors. The Firm is undertaking an investigation to determine why its controls failed and to ensure appropriate corrective action is taken. However, as the supervising attorney ultimately responsible for signing and submitting the Filed Response Brief, I bear the responsibility for failing to personally verify the citations included in the brief.
Tony Ortega, who first wrote about this AI snafu in The Underground Bunker, a Scientology-focused Substack newsletter, put it succinctly: “Oh, this is awful.” He added that Boies Schiller “appears to have handed [Scientology leader] David Miscavige a big club to hit them over the head with.”
I reached out to BSF for comment. A firm spokesperson directed me to Kucera’s filing (which was also its response to Ortega).
Burford Capital helps companies and law firms unlock the value of their legal assets. With a portfolio of over $7 billion and listings on the NYSE and LSE, Burford provides capital to finance high-value commercial litigation and arbitration—without adding cost or risk or giving up control. Clients include Fortune 500 companies and Am Law 100 firms, who turn to Burford to pursue strong claims, manage legal costs, and accelerate recoveries. Learn more at burfordcapital.com.
To his credit, John Kucera fully and freely admitted the errors, and he didn’t throw any colleagues under the bus—even though I’m guessing the brief was prepared in the first instance by associates, whom Kucera did not name. No associates’ names appeared on the original response brief. The only lawyers on the brief besides Kucera were two partners, Alison Anderson and Max Pritt—and in the proposed corrected brief submitted along with his motion, Kucera removed the names of Anderson and Pritt, presumably because they had little or no roles in this mess.
I can also confirm Kucera’s statement that Boies Schiller “is committed to the responsible use of artificial intelligence and has adopted policies and implemented trainings” about AI. For the past two years, I’ve moderated panels at BSF’s New York offices about AI—and during these well-attended panels, which featured a BSF partner speaking alongside outside experts about AI, I’ve learned about the firm’s innovative, cautious, and thoughtful approach to integrating AI into its work.
That said, there’s no denying that this is… suboptimal. Involving a Vault 100 and Am Law 200 law firm that’s a litigation powerhouse, it’s arguably Biglaw’s biggest artificial-intelligence debacle to date.
In February, I wrote a post titled A Major Law Firm’s ChatGPT Fail. But I’ll confess that the headline’s reference to “a major law firm” was a little clickbaity (because you can take the boy out of Above the Law, but you can’t take Above the Law out of the boy).
That post involved Morgan & Morgan, a prominent plaintiffs’ firm. But even though Morgan & Morgan might be big in terms of headcount, with more than 1,000 lawyers across 125 offices, it’s not “Biglaw”—as in “elite,” “prestigious,” and “super profitable.” In contrast, Boies Schiller—founded by former Biglaw partners, teeming with T14 grads, and boasting $2.1 million in revenue per lawyer and $3.9 million in profits per equity partner—most definitely belongs to the Biglaw club.
What’s Boies Schiller’s “competition” for Biglaw’s biggest AI abomination? In July, Law.com prepared a list of 10 Top AI Blunders, but most of them involved either small-firm practitioners or non-U.S. law firms.
One featured Butler Snow—but at #155 in the latest Am Law 200, it’s not exactly a marquee name. Another involved K&L Gates—but it shared the blame in that snafu with a boutique, Ellis George, and it appeared that the errors were originally made by the Ellis George lawyer (which his K&L Gates co-counsel failed to catch).
A third incident involved Latham & Watkins, a Biglaw name definitely deserving of veneration. But that AI error was pretty trivial: in a footnote to an expert report, one source was given an incorrect title and authors. As the Latham lawyer explained in her declaration, “[t]he article in question genuinely exists, was reviewed by [the expert], and supports her opinion.” So while the mistake was embarrassing—especially since it arose in a case where Latham represented the AI company Anthropic, and the error was introduced into the report by Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude—it could be fairly described as de minimis.
I think it’s therefore fair to say that Boies Schiller Flexner is now the Biglaw “leader” in terms of AI fails. But again, I wouldn’t judge BSF too harshly—lest ye be judged.
Let’s return to the quotation I used to open this post: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” After ChatGPT confidently assured me that this quote was said by Andy Warhol, I plunked it into my draft without hesitation, attributing to Warhol. But when I conducted a confirmatory Google search before publishing this post, I came across a Smithsonian magazine article suggesting that it wasn’t actually uttered by Warhol—which is why I revised my opening sentence to describe Warhol as being “credited with saying,” as opposed to actually saying, the “15 minutes” quip.
So I came perilously close to a ChatGPT fail of my own. And while this is merely a Substack post, written by a guy on a couch in his pajamas—not a brief filed in a court of law, by a partner who probably charges more than $2,000 an hour, that was (or should have been) cite-checked by multiple associates and paralegals—it could have been embarrassing for me. Especially in an article about AI screw-ups.
I’ll leave you with this parting thought. The next time you hear about an epic AI fail, instead of (or at least after) laughing your ass off, perhaps have the humility to say this to yourself: “There but for the grace of God go (A)I.”
Thanks for reading Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to my paid subscribers for making this publication possible. Subscribers get (1) access to Judicial Notice, my time-saving weekly roundup of the most notable news in the legal world; (2) additional stories reserved for paid subscribers; (3) transcripts of podcast interviews; and (4) the ability to comment on posts. You can email me at davidlat@substack.com with questions or comments, and you can share this post or subscribe using the buttons below.
Of course read and assess what you are supposed to have written before submission - especially to a court. Common sense isn’t and many folks arr lazy.
On Warhol’s quote, I believe it derivates from a comment painter Philip Pearlstein made. Pearlstein, who with Warhol attended Carnegie Mellon, had been featured in Life Magazine. When they were new to the school, Warhol (then Warhola) walked up to Pearlstein, introduced himself, and said, “you’re famous.” Pearlstein responded, “I was, for 15 minutes.”