MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s diehard support for Donald Trump’s election lies has landed him in multiple legal entanglements, including a case in Denver, where the pillow salesman is currently being sued for defamation by a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems. Eric Coomer, who previously worked for the election vendor, has accused Lindell of having defamed him with his paranoid rantings about the 2020 presidential election having been rigged against Trump. In a situation that is already adequately stupid, there is always room for things to get stupider, as this week it was reported that Lindell’s lawyer was in hot water for having filed a legal brief that was written with generative AI.
U.S. District Court Judge Nina Wang is trying to get to the bottom of how and why Lindell’s lawyer, Christopher Kachouroff, decided to file a court brief that included a large number of fabricated legal citations. In a filing made this week, Wang sought to clarify why Kachouroff and Lindell’s other lawyer, Jennifer DeMaster, had allowed such a disastrously unprofessional thing to happen.
The brief that Kachouroff previously submitted was stuffed full of “nearly thirty” glaring errors, including, among other things, “citation of cases that do not exist,” court papers show. “Despite having every opportunity to do so, Mr. Kachouroff declined to explain to the Court how the Opposition became replete with such fundamental errors,” the filing made by Wang states. “Time and time again, when Mr. Kachouroff was asked for an explanation of why citations to legal authorities were inaccurate, he declined to offer any explanation.”
According to the filing, Kachouroff previously claimed that the errors were the result of his own mistakes, stating: “Your Honor, I may have made a mistake and I may have paraphrased and put quotes by mistake. I wasn’t intending to mislead the Court. I don’t think the quote is far off from what you read to me.”
Now, however, Kachouroff has admitted that the reason there were so many errors in the brief is that it was generated by a chatbot.
“Not until this Court asked Mr. Kachouroff directly whether the Opposition was the product of generative artificial intelligence did Mr. Kachouroff admit that he did, in fact, use generative artificial intelligence,” the filing states. “After further questioning, Mr. Kachouroff admitted that he failed to cite check the authority in the Opposition after such use before filing it with the Court.”
Wang has now given Kachouroff and DeMaster until May 5th to explain how this moronic bungling of legal practice came about. If they can’t explain it sufficiently by then, Wang says the two attorneys will be referred for disciplinary proceedings for having violated the rules of professional conduct to which they’re sworn. Gizmodo reached out to Kachouroff and DeMaster for comment.
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