An elite Wall Street law firm has apologized to a federal judge for submitting a court filing full of errors created by artificial intelligence, including “hallucinations” that case quotes were fabricated.
The AI-generated errors came to light in a recent motion in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan and were discovered by lawyers at an opposing firm, Andrew Dietderichs, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, wrote in a letter to Judge Martin Glenn on April 18.
“We deeply regret that this happened,” Mr. Dietderichs wrote.
The firm provided an account of the errors, which ran to three pages and totaled about three dozen. Many of them included quotations of imaginary passages seemingly from real cases.
Sullivan & Cromwell is one of the oldest and most prestigious law firms in the country. It is representing President Trump in several appeals, including his criminal conviction in a 2024 case involving hush money payments to a porn star. Jay Clayton, now U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, was a lawyer and previously a partner in the firm.
The apology marks the latest embarrassing mistake for lawyers who were found to have used AI to craft faulty arguments. There is talk of increasing and widespread use of AI in the legal profession, which is attracting lawyers doing large-scale research, even if it has a tendency to spark legal falsehoods.
A number of cases in recent years have highlighted the dangers the use of AI poses to lawyers. In 2023, a federal judge in Manhattan fined two lawyers $5,000 after they submitted a brief of fabricated cases by ChatGPT.
American Bar Association gave instructions Lawyers should exercise caution when providing signals or receiving results for AI models. Mr Dietderichs wrote in his letter that the firm’s policies governing the use of AI were “not followed” in preparing the proposal.
It is unclear what AI tools or programs were used by Sullivan and Cromwell to generate the errors. A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment. there was news of the letter informed First by Reuters.
The filing by Sullivan & Cromwell came in a case involving the Prince Group, a Cambodian conglomerate whose founder Chen Ze was indicted last year in federal district court in Brooklyn on charges that he operated a global scam operation.
His lawyers and representatives have denied the allegations. Mr. Chen, who was not in the United States when the indictment was announced, was extradited from Cambodia to China in January.
On April 8, Prince Group, a Cambodian conglomerate with several business entities incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, filed for bankruptcy in Manhattan. Sullivan & Cromwell are representing a group of people appointed by authorities in the British Virgin Islands to oversee Prince Group’s liquidated assets in that territory.
Some of the errors were identified in a public filing by lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner, the law firm representing Prince Group. A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment. After learning of the errors, Mr. Dietderichs wrote, the firm reviewed all other filings in the case. The AI hallucination was contained in a single filing, he wrote.
According to Mr. Dietderich’s letter, Sullivan & Cromwell requires its lawyers to take a training course before gaining access to the AI tool. In the training sermons, Mr. Dietderichs wrote, “Trust nothing and verify everything.”
