Lawyers Use ChatGPT to Add Up Fees, Judge Faults Their Math

A law firm’s attempt to use ChatGPT to estimate its fees was rejected by a federal judge who issued a scorching rebuke as the legal industry struggles to figure out how to integrate artificial intelligence into its work.

The issue arose in a lawsuit by the Cuddy Law Firm, a group of attorneys focused on special education, seeking legal fees from New York City after successfully representing a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other disabilities.

The firm had sought more than $113,000 in fees plus interest, partially relying on feedback it received from ChatGPT, which it claimed was a “cross-check” supporting other reasoning. But US District Judge Paul Engelmayer awarded just a little over $53,000, and criticized the firm for its use of the AI tool “as support for its aggressive fee is utterly and unusually unpersuasive.”

“As the firm should have appreciated, treating ChatGPT’s conclusions as a useful gauge of the reasonable billing rate for the work of a lawyer with a particular background carrying out a bespoke assignment for a client in a niche practice area was misbegotten at the jump,” the judge wrote in an opinion Thursday.

The decision comes as lawyers grapple with the impact of artificial intelligence and judges have worked to clarify how the technology can be used in courtrooms. Michael Cohen, the former lawyer of Donald Trump, unwittingly included phony cases generated by AI in a brief last year arguing for his release from post-prison supervision.

One of the firm’s lawyers, Benjamin Kopp, pointed to documents in the case in a response to the opinion. In the filings, Kopp said that he conducted queries of ChatGPT about its knowledge of the legal industry, including rates that clients might expect to be charged and questions they might ask about how various factors specific to cases might influence fees. The intent, he said in the filings, was to provide context to what a parent using the AI tool might use in researching whether to hire an attorney.

Engelmayer referenced two other cases in which lawyers were fined or faced discipline for relying on fictitious citations created by AI. The judge said he was rejecting ChatGPT’s conclusions and warned the firm to refrain from references to it in future legal fees requests “barring a paradigm shift in the reliability of this tool.”

“The Cuddy Law Firm does not identify the inputs on which ChatGPT relied. It does not reveal whether any of these were similarly imaginary,” Engelmayer said. “It does not reveal whether ChatGPT anywhere considered a very real and relevant data point: the uniform bloc of precedent, canvassed below, in which courts in this district and circuit have rejected as excessive the billing rates the Cuddy Law Firm urges for its timekeepers.”

The case is JG, individually and on behalf of GG v New York City Department of Education, 23-cv-959, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

To contact the reporter on this story:
Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net

Peter Jeffrey

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