A federal judge has ordered the attorneys for MyPillow founder Mike Lindell to pay fines for using artificial intelligence to prepare court documents that contained several errors, including citations to nonexistent cases and misquotations of cited cases.
Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster, both attorneys for Lindell in his defamation case, violated court rules when they filed a motion on Feb. 25 that contained nearly 30 defective citations, Judge Nina Y. Wang of the U.S. District Court in Denver ruled Monday, July 7.
The court order obtained by USA TODAY says Lindell’s attorneys filed the motion in response to an earlier motion filed by Eric Coomer, a former director at Dominion Voting Systems, who accused the MyPillow CEO of defaming him by helping spread a conspiracy theory that he rigged the election against President Donald Trump.
A federal jury ruled in favor of Coomer on June 16, ending a lawsuit that the former director filed in May 2022 against Lindell and his two companies, MyPillow and FrankSpeech. Following the verdict, Lindell was ordered to pay over $2 million in damages, a number nowhere near the award amount Coomer had requested ($62.7 million), court records show.
USA TODAY contacted Kachouroff and DeMaster on Tuesday, July 8, but has not received a response.
How did the court find out Lindell’s attorneys used AI?
When the court questioned Kachouroff about the errors during a pretrial conference, he told Wang that he delegated the citation checking for the motion to his co-counsel, DeMaster, the court order reads.
Wang did ask Kachouroff if the motion was “generated by generative artificial intelligence?” The attorney responded: “Not initially. Initially, I did an outline for myself, and I drafted a motion, and then we ran it through AI.”
After Kachouroff’s admission, Wang asked him if he double checked the “citations once it was run through artifical intelligence?” The attorney responded: “Your Honor, I personally did not check it. I amresponsible for it not being checked.”
“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 the two attorneys was “the least severe sanction adequate to deter and punish defense counsel in this instance.”
Kachouroff told judge error-riddled motion was filed by accident
Kachouroff also told Wang that the error-riddled motion was a draft that was filed by accident, according to the court document. Despite this, the judge found that the “final” version the attorney said he intended to file still contained “substantive errors,” including some that were not included in the filed version.
Both the attorneys’ “contradictory statements and the lack of corroborating evidence” is what led to Wang deeming that the filing of the AI-generated motion was not “an advertent error” and merited a sanction, the court document reads.
“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 in her ruling.
Both attorneys were ordered to pay $3,000 each.
Contributing: Melina Khan & Natalie Neysa Alund/ USA TODAY
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mike Lindell’s attorneys fined for AI-generated court filing
