The counterpoint here is that there is already a cause of action for this type of incompetence and it's called malpractice, which is a pretty reasonable road to remedy. I don't know if you actually think these were "fraudulent court documents", but "fraudulent" actually means something very specific and this ain't it. Even if the court is considering sanctions (which is not the same as disbarment), that seems at least partially related to the attys' failure to address their failure once they were aware of it.
Something interesting about the legal profession is that it is self-regulating. The state bars are typically not government organizations. Attorneys know that confidence in their profession is extremely important and they strike the balance between preserving that confidence and, you know, destroying someone's livelihood because they don't understand how LLMs work.
> Why not blame your laptop manufacturer for creating the hardware you used to file your fraudulent court documents?
Because your laptop manufacturer doesnt claim your laptop “thinks”, is “intelligent”, doesnt build an entire fud marketing campaign around the two, doesnt claim it “creates” ideas on its own, doesnt claim it “learns like a human”, doesnt claim it has cognitive abilities and so on.
Come on. We're dealing with qualified professionals here. The buck stops with them.
A professional civil engineer blaming a new untested simulation software after a bridge fails and causes injury - does it matter what the software claimed to do? It could claim itself to be god, but it's still up to the professionals to evaluate and select the tools they choose to use.
It's not like they were using an industry-standard tool they've been using for many years and it suddenly did something unexpected.
This is clearly carelessness. A basic out-of-bound check on the cases it hallucinated would be part of basic due-diligence. Digitized case indices are available within minutes.
What's even more egregious is that they went to the same tool to confirm its own reliability after they got some indication that it was unreliable. It doesn't take a professional to have commonsense.
The lawyers not only cited bogus cases, but when asked to provide copies of those bogus cases, fabricated multiple page PDF documents from whole cloth. This is impossible to argue as a mistake.
> Disbarment is equivalent to taking away his entire life's work.
'Lawyer' is the kind of profession which actually holds its practitioners to a standard, because the system falls apart when they stop behaving honestly.
This wasn't an oopsie-daisies, this was dishonesty, followed by further dishonesty, when they supplied bogus references for these cases.
It crossed the line from stupidity into dishonesty when the judge asked him "Wtf is this court case that you're citing", and the lawyer sent the judge a fabricated document.
How can anyone trust anything a lawyer does, when they are willing to fabricate documents, in order to continue to lie to a judge? This is Better Call Saul-level chicanery.
He could have fessed up and apologized when called out on it, but he doubled down.
A negligent civil engineer that failed to verify construction details provided by GPT, which later led to a bridge collapse, would lose their license. A negligent doctor that failed to vet a treatment protocol to a patient that later caused them harm would lose their license. Negligence is a fair, reasonable, and valid reason for someone to be determined unqualified to practice their profession in the future.
Why not blame your laptop manufacturer for creating the hardware you used to file your fraudulent court documents?