B.C. lawyer reprimanded for citing fake cases invented by ChatGPT
CBC
The cases would have provided compelling precedent for a divorced dad to take his children to China — had they been real.
But instead of savouring courtroom victory, the Vancouver lawyer for a millionaire embroiled in an acrimonious split has been told to personally compensate her client's ex-wife's lawyers for the time it took them to learn the cases she hoped to cite were conjured up by ChatGPT.
In a decision released Monday, a B.C. Supreme Court judge reprimanded lawyer Chong Ke for including two AI "hallucinations" in an application filed last December.
The cases never made it into Ke's arguments; they were withdrawn once she learned they were non-existent.
Justice David Masuhara said he didn't think the lawyer intended to deceive the court — but he was troubled all the same.
"As this case has unfortunately made clear, generative AI is still no substitute for the professional expertise that the justice system requires of lawyers," Masuhara wrote in a "final comment" appended to his ruling.
"Competence in the selection and use of any technology tools, including those powered by AI, is critical."
Ke represents Wei Chen, a businessman whose net worth — according to Chinese divorce proceedings — is said to be between $70 and $90 million. Chen's ex-wife, Nina Zhang, lives with their three children in an $8.4 million home in West Vancouver.
Last December, the court ordered Chen to pay Zhang $16,062 a month in child support after calculating his annual income at $1 million.
Shortly before that ruling, Ke filed an application on Chen's behalf for an order permitting his children to travel to China.
The notice of application cited two cases: one in which a mother took her "child, aged 7, to India for six weeks" and another granting a "mother's application to travel with the child, aged 9, to China for four weeks to visit her parents and friends."
"These cases are at the centre of the controversy before me, as they were discovered to be non-existent," Masuhara wrote.
The problem came to light when Zhang's lawyers told Ke's office they needed copies of the cases to prepare a response and couldn't locate them by their citation identifiers.
Ke gave a letter of apology along with an admission the cases were fake to an associate who was to appear at a court hearing in her place, but the matter wasn't heard that day and the associate didn't give Zhang's lawyers a copy.
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