Associated Incidents
Afederal judge ordered two attorneys representing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to pay $3,000 each after they used artificial intelligence to prepare a court filing that was riddled with errors, including citations to nonexistent cases and misquotations of case law.
Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster violated court rules when they filed the motion that had contained nearly 30 defective citations, Judge Nina Y. Wang of the U.S. District Court in Denver ruled Monday.
"Notwithstanding any suggestion to the contrary, this Court derives no joy from sanctioning attorneys who appear before it," Wang wrote in her ruling, adding that the sanction against Kachourouff and Demaster was "the least severe sanction adequate to deter and punish defense counsel in this instance."
The motion was filed in Lindell's defamation case, which ended last month when a Denver jury found Lindell liable for defamation for pushing false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
The filing misquoted court precedents and highlighted legal principles that were not involved in the cases it cited, according to the ruling.
During a pretrial hearing after the errors were discovered, Kachouroff admitted to using generative artificial intelligence to write the motion.
Kachouroff initially told the judge that the motion was a draft and was filed by accident. But the "final" version that he said was the correct one was still riddled with "substantive errors," including some that were not included in the filed version, Wang wrote.
It was the attorneys' "contradictory statements and the lack of corroborating evidence" that led the judge to believe that the filing of the AI-generated motion was not "an inadvertent error" and deserved a sanction.
The judge also found Kachouroff's accusation of the court trying to "blindside" him over the errors were "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," Wang wrote.
Kachouroff and DeMaster did not immediately return a request for comment Monday.