From Pymnts · PYMNTS · · 1m 20s
A lawyer let ChatGPT invent witnesses
A New Mexico defense attorney filed a murder appeal brief full of testimony from people who never existed.
In brief
A New Mexico defense attorney filed a murder appeal brief full of testimony from people who never existed. AI output is a draft, not a filing. If you did not check every citation and fact yourself, you did not do the work. Originally reported by Pymnts.
Held in contempt
New Mexico's Supreme Court found defense attorney Stephen Aarons in direct contempt on Sept. 9 for a murder appeal brief built on people who never testified.
“false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses”
Referred for discipline
The court sent Aarons to a disciplinary board, saying he showed no remorse and no concern for the client whose appeal he had just poisoned.
“demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client”
He checked nothing
Aarons admitted he verified none of the facts or legal authority before filing, and never told his client the brief was riddled with misrepresentations.
Bulletproof, he assumed
He told the court he used ChatGPT running OpenAI's o3 model and trusted it because AI is used so widely in law and medicine.
“I assumed that it generated a bulletproof summary of proceedings”
Head in the sand
Justice C. Shannon Bacon said hallucinations are a daily front-page story, so claiming ignorance was itself a choice.
“either you buried your head in the sand ... or you took a gamble, and neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct”
The profession is split
Law schools have started banning AI in classrooms, while 87% of corporate legal departments now report using generative AI, up from 44% a year earlier.
“Generative AI has become a fixture in the majority of legal departments”
In short
AI output is a draft, not a filing. If you did not check every citation and fact yourself, you did not do the work.
