MANHATTAN (CN) — Donald Trump’s former personal fixer Michael Cohen furnished his lawyers with bogus legal citations generated by Google’s Bard AI software, letters unsealed Friday in Manhattan criminal court show.
Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney and media attack dog-turned-cooperating witness, cited the phony court rulings in a brief filed in the Southern District of New York seeking to have his post-prison supervision end early.
In a sworn declaration unsealed Friday morning, Cohen explained that he had not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology,” and had used Google's Bard AI software for case citations, thinking it was “a super-charged search engine,” and did not realize it was a generative AI service like Chat-GPT that "could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not."
Citing his current status as a disbarred “non-lawyer,” Cohen told the judge he expected his pro bono lawyer David M. Schwartz to make the final reviews and confirmations of the case citations he suggested to support his motion to end supervision.
"I did not know that Google Bard could generate non-existent cases, nor did I have access to Westlaw or other standard resources for confirming the details of cases,” Cohen wrote in the declaration.
Cohen, who pleaded guilty in August 2018 to campaign finance violations and served time at the Otisville correctional facility, had asked U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman for an early end to court supervision of his case, more than three years after he was released to home confinement in May 2020.
The inclusion of the invalid citations “was a mistake driven by sloppiness, not malicious intent,” Cohen’s other attorney E. Danya Perry explained in a letter to U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman.
"Mr. Cohen had used Google Bard to successfully identify accurate information in other contexts before and did not appreciate its unreliability as a tool for legal research,” Perry wrote. “Like most lay clients, Mr. Cohen does not have access to Westlaw or other standard legal research tools to verify any citations he finds online. Instead, he trusted his attorney to verify them on his behalf.”
Before taking on Cohen as a client, Perry — the co-founder of the firm Perry Guha — sat at the prosecution side of table as former senior trial counsel and deputy chief of the criminal division at the Southern District of New York.
U.S. District Judge Furman issued an order earlier in the month telling Cohen’s counsel to provide by Dec. 19 copies of three rulings Schwartz cited in the motion he filed the previous month.
If the copies could not be produced, the judge asked Schwartz to explain in writing why he should not be sanctioned. “As far as the Court can tell, none of these cases exist,” Furman wrote.
He added that if copies of the rulings weren't submitted, he wanted “a thorough explanation of how the motion came to cite cases that do not exist and what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played in drafting or reviewing the motion before it was filed.”
“As Mr. Cohen’s attorney and fiduciary, Mr. Schwartz had final sign-off on the submission and its content. Cohen,” Perry wrote. “Unbeknownst to Mr. Cohen, Mr. Schwartz signed off on the motion without having ever checked the citations it contained.”
Cohen urged the judge to "exercise its discretion and mercy in this matter."
Cohen’s use of generative AI software to produce legal citations is the second incident this year that a judge in Manhattan federal court weighed punishment over attorneys’ use of artificial intelligence technology: U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel ordered two attorneys each to pay $5,000 after they submitted legal briefs in a personal injury case using fictitious case citations invented by the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Cohen testified against the former president at Trump’s civil financial fraud trial in Manhattan Supreme Court in October. He is also expected to be a key witness against his former employer in the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal trial in 2024 over Trump’s role in making hush money payments to two women ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
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