California bar adopts 'snitch' rule, lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases, lawyers in Meta data privacy case seek $181 million, and more ⬇️
Reuters Legal
From the courts to law firms, we bring you the latest legal news. Subscribe to our newsletters: https://bit.ly/3nhgllA
☀️ Good morning from The Legal File! Here are today's top legal stories:
The California Supreme Court on Wednesday adopted a lawyer professional misconduct reporting rule that brings it in line with every other state.
Lawyers in California starting on Aug. 1 will be required to report fraud, misappropriation of funds and other criminal acts or conduct that raise "a substantial question" about another lawyer's "honesty, trustworthiness, or fitness as a lawyer."
Adoption of the so-called “snitch rule” comes after intense debate within the State Bar of California, which recommended the rule change to the court earlier this month. It received nearly 200 comments from attorneys opposed to the rule, who warned that it would overwhelm the state bar’s disciplinary system with complaints and inhibit the lawyer and client relationship.
The State Bar has been under mounting pressure to bolster attorney oversight in the wake of the Tom Girardi scandal and a longstanding backlog in attorney discipline cases. Girardi, the founder of now-defunct law firm Girardi Keese, was the subject of 205 attorney ethics complaints beginning in 1982 with more than half accusing him of misusing client funds, according to a state bar investigation.
A U.S. judge on Thursday imposed sanctions on two New York lawyers who submitted a legal brief that included six fictitious case citations generated by an artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT. U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan ordered lawyers Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman to pay a $5,000 fine in total.
The judge found the lawyers acted in bad faith and made 'acts of conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the court.'
Schwartz admitted in May that he had used ChatGPT to help research the brief in a client's personal injury case against Colombian airline Avianca and unknowingly included the false citations. LoDuca's name was the only one on the brief that Schwartz prepared.
The judge wrote in Thursday's sanctions order that there is nothing "inherently improper" in lawyers using AI "for assistance," but he said lawyer ethics rules "impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings."
Recommended by LinkedIn
Plaintiffs' lawyers have asked a San Francisco federal judge to award more than $181 million in legal fees as part of a $725 million data privacy settlement with Facebook parent company Meta Platforms resolving claims over sharing of user information with third parties.
Co-lead counsel at plaintiffs law firms Keller Rohrback and Bleichmar Fonti & Auld said in a motion filed late Wednesday the fees would represent 25% of the settlement fund which is "within the range awarded in comparably sized cases."
The lawyers said in the filing that the $725 million settlement is the largest data-privacy recovery in history and the largest private settlement Facebook has ever agreed to. Class counsel worked more than 149,000 hours on the case over nearly five years, they said.
The long-running lawsuit was sparked by revelations in 2018 that Facebook had allowed British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access data of as many as 87 million users.
Former U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner should have to face some claims in a lawsuit filed by an Indiana man who says he is owed $170,000 for working at Posner Center of Justice for Pro Se's, a short-lived center for self-represented litigants founded by the prominent jurist, a magistrate judge said.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Joshua Kolar of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana said in a written recommendation filed on Wednesday that Brian Vukadinovich's fraud claim against Posner should be dismissed, because it echoes another count in the lawsuit. However, Kolar recommended that Posner's bids to dismiss claims of breach of contract and unjust enrichment should be denied.
Kolar's recommendation is not binding, and the parties have two weeks to file objections to his report. A U.S. district judge will issue the final ruling on the motion to dismiss.
Posner, appointed to the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by former Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was one of the country's most prominent judges when he abruptly announced his retirement from the bench in September 2017 at age 78. He founded the center in mid-2018.
👋 That's all for today! Thank you for reading The Legal File! Have a great weekend!
For more legal industry news, read and subscribe to The Daily Docket.
Account Manager. I figure things out so my clients don't have to.
1yComplaints that the "Snitch Rule" would overwhelm the disciplinary system with the sheer number of complaints sort of prove the point that it is necessary, don't they?