Lawyers, dog custody and sanctions for use of fake AI

It’s the baseball season here so there is no reason to turn on the TV. All you will get is wall to wall baseball and, yes, basketball…. ladies’ college basketball. Not just the TV but also the print media. The Bruins stormed back after trailing against Duke to win 70-58 and reach the final four of the NCAA Tournament. To the uneducated eye that does not seem very exciting but put in Connacht championship and mention Mayo and Galway, instead of NCAA and the Bruins and Duke and you get an understanding of the fever that basketball generates in this city.

Conversations about the weather, surprisingly for me, are as frequent among Long Beach residents as they are at home. There is a difference in emphasis of course. They worry about the high temperatures while we complain about the rain. They look forward to rain, because they know it will not go on for more than a few minutes (or perhaps hours!) while we worry when, if ever, the rain will stop. I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that people in Long Beach are just as occupied with the mundane issues of everyday life as we are at home. For a country involved in regime change in Venezuela and Iran, not to mention upcoming Cuba, they remain concerned but sanguine. The Iran war is far away from California and while there is concern about President Trump, it is not something to be greatly alarmed about. Life goes on.

Apple made the front page and half the back page of the Los Angeles Times. The $3.5 trillion tech titan is celebrating its 50th birthday. Seeing as how we think of Apple as an Irish (Cork) company, I thought I should read the article to get a feel for how much the Irish wing of the operation had contributed to the success of the company. There was not so much as a dicky bird about Apple in Ireland which seems to suggest that all this stuff we hear about Irish graduates being the reason why Apple has invested so much in Cork and Dublin is a load of old cobblers. We should be thankful that Apple has contributed so much revenue to the Irish coffers and maybe it is just as well that the big boys in Silicon Valley do not know that they have an Irish outpost. Apple it seems is contending with the AI race but is seen to be trailing behind but, Cork will be delighted to hear, the analysts suggest Apple is positioned well. Whatever that means?

AI, to which I’m a foreigner, appears to be the future. But it is not without its problems, as lawyers in LA are finding out. The legal business is big, very big, in America. No matter where you go on the major roads in California you are confronted with huge lit up signs advertising law firms who can get you a bunch of money if you have an accident. It seems to me the sight of these advertising hoardings could well be a cause of accidents. But that’s another story. Clearly there are excellent lawyers but there would appear to be lazy lawyers, who use AI to fabricate citations (precedents) to support their case.

Under the heading “AI fabrications cloud custody battle for pet dog” Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik details the case of a custody battle over a sixteen-year-old pet Labrador retriever. The case arose after a family court had agreed the dissolution of the marriage of Juan Pablo Torres Campos and Leslie Ann Munos. The dissolution order allowed both parties to keep their own property but did not mention the dog which remained with Ms Munos. Things rested so until Torres Campos sought shared custody of the dog and visiting rights. Munos resisted saying Torres Campos didn’t care about the dog and was only interested in harassing her.

The Family Court agreed with her, but Torres Campos appealed and then the fun started as AI was introduced. Rosanne Chung Bonar, lawyer for Ms Munos, in her reply to Torres Campos, cited California cases from 1984 and 1995 to support her refusal to grant visiting rights. The citations were fictitious. They had been posted by an Oregon blogger and pet rescuer. Munos was given the article by a friend and passed them on to her lawyer, who was forced to admit that they were fictitious. To cut a long story short Torres Campos was denied visiting rights to the dog but Rosanne Chung Bonar was sanctioned with a fine of $5,000 largely because she did not initially acknowledge that her citations were fake.

That was something of a shaggy dog story, but columnist Hiltzik also highlighted the case of a civil lawsuit in Oregon involving a family dispute over a $29 million winery fortune. It seems the sibling got involved in a “vicious dispute” over the estate and naturally lawyers got involved and used AI to assist in the case. The lawyers representing the plaintiff, according to Federal Magistrate Mark D Clarke, incorporated 15 fabricated case citations and eight misquotations into case filings. The Magistrate ordered the attorneys to pay $90,000 in legal fees and noted “in the quickly expanding universe of cases involving sanctions for the misuse of artificial intelligence this case is an outlier in both degree and volume”. He also noted that the plaintiff’s lawyers never “adequately fessed up to their wrongdoing”. It seems that failing to “fess up” is now being regarded as a big sin.

It goes without saying that our solicitors, barristers and senior counsel here in good old honest Ireland would never stoop so low as to use AI in preparing their cases for court…. or would they?

Sunday here was a big day as Californians and indeed the rest of the country came out in force to declare that they would not tolerate kings in the good old USA. It was estimated that about 8 million people came out to protest against their President who, in his commitment to get things done, bypasses the American Constitution whenever he feels the need. Eight million out of 240 million is a sizable number but not one to exercise the President who naturally blames “lefties” and Democrats for all the turmoil on the streets. For the most part the protests passed off peacefully but as is routine here the “law” has to do its duty and there were the usual arrests. A case, in many instances, of rounding up the usual suspects with particular attention being paid to the protestors who chose to dress up as the Statue of Liberty. They were of course pleased to be arrested.

There is concern about the war in Iran but it is far away and, to a large extent, out of mind. Just as all politics is local so too all news is local and in SoCal (Southern California) the main man is Pomona’s Victor Glover who is set to pilot NASA’s Artemis 11 mission to the moon, and, as Buzz Lightyear would have it, beyond. Pomona is just down the road and Glover is a local boy who has done well. By the time you read this Artemis 11 will have successfully taken off and will hopefully be on its way past the moon, giving Mr Trump something of real value to celebrate.

Thought for the Day... 

Get the suncream on.