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Judge rebukes law firm using ChatGPT to justify $113,484.62 fee as “utterly and unusually unpersuasive”
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The legal eagles at New York-based Cuddy Law tried using OpenAI's chatbot, despite its penchant for lying and spouting nonsense, to help justify their hefty fees for a recently won trial, a sum the losing side is expected to pay.
NYC federal district Judge Paul Engelmayer, however, rejected the submitted amount, awarded less than half of what Cuddy requested, and added a sharp rebuke to the lawyers for using ChatGPT to cross-check the figures.
The briefs basically cited ChatGPT's output to support their stated hourly rate, which does depend on things like the level and amount of research, preparation, and other work involved.
Cuddy told the court "its requested hourly rates are supported by feedback it received from the artificial intelligence tool 'ChatGPT-4,'" Engelmayer wrote in his order [PDF], referring to the GPT-4 version of OpenAI's bot.
"As the firm should have appreciated, treating ChatGPT's conclusions as a useful gauge of the reasonable billing rate for the work of a lawyer with a particular background carrying out a bespoke assignment for a client in a niche practice area was misbegotten at the jump," Judge Engelmayer said.
Benjamin Kopp, a lawyer at Cuddy Law, told The Register his firm's use of AI wasn't anything like cases that fabricated court documents; this particular situation had nothing to do with influencing the legal process.
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