Associated Incidents
We all remember Mike Lindell, the disgraced MyPillow founder who lost everything fighting to prove — against insurmountable evidence to the contrary — that the 2020 US election had somehow been stolen from Donald Trump.
Well, he's in the news again — this time for using AI to file his legal briefs.
As The New Republic reported, a federal judge has accused Lindell of filing a legal document with "nearly 30 defective citations," which one of his attorneys, Christopher Kachouroff, wrote "utilizing generative artificial intelligence."
Go figure: the brief was full of misquotes and miscited cases, sometimes referencing case law that simply didn't exist — AI had hallucinated them, as the tech is prone to do in order to "complete" its prompt.
"If you type a legal question into the Google search function, then generative AI is all too ready to answer," explained legal columnist Virginia Hammerle. She notes that in a similar case in New York, a federal judge sanctioned a team of lawyers and their firm when they turned in a ChatGPT-generated brief without double-checking it for mistakes.
"Not until this Court asked Mr. Kachouroff directly whether the [document] was the product of generative artificial intelligence did Mr. Kachouroff admit that he did, in fact, use generative artificial intelligence," the federal judge admonished. "Given the pervasiveness of the errors in the legal authority provided to it, this Court treats this representation with skepticism."
The federal judge has now given Lindell's lawyers ten days to argue why they shouldn't face disciplinary proceedings. They're also required to address whether or not Lindell had any knowledge that his lawyers were using AI to write their documents — yet another headache for the embattled entrepreneur.
It's far from the first gaffe Kachouroff has been involved in. During a trial which took place over Zoom last year, the attorney was caught relaxing without any pants on before beginning his cross-examination.
It's the latest embarrassment in a years-long legal saga for Lindell, who faces a combined $70 million in debt owing to penalties from a civil lawsuits and an FBI investigation after personally championing Donald Trump's 2020 election-fraud hoax.
After failing to pay more than $50,000 related to a defamation suit with voting systems company Smartmatic earlier in April, Lindell sobbed that he was broke. "I'm in ruins," the disgraced pillow tycoon said. "I don’t have $5,000 or 5 cents."
That's a shame, because if he did, he could be out shopping for new lawyers — like maybe the kind that keep their pants on during trial.