Mata v. Avianca, Inc.

What happened

Roberto Mata sued Avianca Airlines for a knee injury sustained on a 2019 flight from El Salvador to New York. When Avianca moved to dismiss on statute-of-limitations grounds under the Montreal Convention, plaintiff's counsel Steven Schwartz — a 30-year attorney at Levidow, Levidow & Oberman — filed an opposition brief containing citations to at least six judicial opinions that did not exist. Schwartz had generated the brief with ChatGPT and, when opposing counsel and the court could not locate the cited cases, submitted a second ChatGPT-generated affidavit with fabricated "screenshots" of the opinions.

Judge Castel ordered a show-cause hearing at which Schwartz admitted he had used ChatGPT for legal research, had asked the model whether the cases were real, and had accepted the model's reassurance that they were. Peter LoDuca, the attorney of record who signed the filings without independent verification, was sanctioned jointly. Judge Castel's June 22, 2023 opinion is a widely cited landmark on attorney duties when using generative AI: "Existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings. [Schwartz and LoDuca] abandoned their responsibilities when they submitted non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT."

The court imposed a $5,000 penalty joint and several against Schwartz, LoDuca, and the firm, and required them to send letters to each of the real judges falsely identified as the author of a fabricated opinion. The court declined to impose harsher sanctions after finding the attorneys had eventually acknowledged the misconduct in good faith. The underlying case was dismissed on statute-of-limitations grounds.