US Politics
Lawyers for MyPillow CEO fined thousands over error-strewn AI court filing about defamation case
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Attorneys for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell have been fined thousands of dollars over an error-strewn court filing written using artificial intelligence in his defamation case.
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court in Denver, Colorado, ordered two lawyers for Lindell to pay $3,000 each, after they used AI to file a document that cited nonexistent cases and misquoted case law, according to the Colorado Sun.
Judge Nina Wang ruled Monday that Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster violated court rules when they filed the motion, which included almost 30 inaccurate citations.
“Notwithstanding any suggestion to the contrary, this Court derives no joy from sanctioning attorneys who appear before it,” Wang said in her ruling.
She added that the fines were “the least severe sanction adequate to deter and punish defense counsel in this instance.”
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Lindell’s defamation case came to an end last month when a jury found him liable for defamation after falsely claiming the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
The document filed by the defense in the case misquoted court precedents and emphasized legal principles that weren’t connected to the cases cited, the ruling stated.
Kachouroff admitted during a pretrial hearing that he had used AI to write the motion. While he said that the motion was a draft filed by accident, Wang wrote that the final version the lawyer said was the right one still had “substantive errors,” including several mistakes that were not in the motion originally filed.
Wang said it was the lawyers’ “contradictory statements and the lack of corroborating evidence” that prompted the judge to think the filing of the motion created by generative AI wasn’t “an inadvertent error” and was worthy of a sanction.
Wang also addressed the allegation from Kachouroff that the court was trying to “blindside” him over the mistakes. The judge said the accusation was “troubling and not well-taken.”
“Neither Mr. Kachouroff nor Ms. DeMaster provided the Court any explanation as to how those citations appeared in any draft of the Opposition absent the use of generative artificial intelligence or gross carelessness by counsel,” said Wang.
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The violating motion was filed on February 25 in response to a previous motion by a former director at Dominion Voting Systems, Eric Coomer, who alleged Lindell defamed him by spreading the conspiracy theory that Coomer helped rig the 2020 election.
The federal jury in Denver ruled in favor of Coomer on June 16. The initial lawsuit was filed in May 2022 against Lindell, MyPillow, and FrankSpeech, another company owned by Lindell. He was ordered to pay $2.3 million in damages. Coomer had asked for $62.7 million, USA Today noted.
Wang asked Kachouroff during a pretrial conference if the motion had been “generated by generative artificial intelligence?”
“Not initially. Initially, I did an outline for myself, and I drafted a motion, and then we ran it through AI,” said Kachouroff.
He told Wang that he had delegated the citation checking to DeMaster, according to the court order.
Wang subsequently asked the attorney if he had double-checked the “citations once it was run through artificial intelligence?”
“Your Honor, I personally did not check it. I am responsible for it not being checked,” said Kachouroff.
The Independent has contacted DeMaster and Kachouroff for comment.
