Penalties are supposed to stop people from violating the law. Getting your face and firm known across the world seems to be sufficient deterrent to future offenders because the “oops I didn’t know” defense won’t apply a second time.
This lawyer at first cited these (fake) cases, and then when asked to provide copies of the cases then faked the copies too, also using ChatGPT.
In my view, that is being caught (asked to provide copies, which is unusual in the legal world, and presumably only done because the judge had failed to find them), and then doing the crime again (using chatgpt to fake these cases)
> sufficient deterrent to future offenders because the “oops I didn’t know” defense won’t apply a second time.
I disagree with this as well, because the error this attorney made wasn't really about using AI. It was about not doing due diligence. Surely even freshly minted lawyers are well aware that doing due diligence is most of what people pay lawyers for in the first place.
That really depends on the profession. If you're a line cook at Waffle House and you get fired for coughing on the eggs, then that's probably not career-ending. If you're a software developer who deletes the production database and causes a week of downtime then that's worse, but likely still not terminal. On the other hand, this guy's income depends to a large extent on convincing his clients that they will be represented competently. Being known primarily for breathtaking incompetence will probably have a pretty significant effect on his future income.
Perhaps so, but most people won't ever know the he's breathtakingly incompetent. It's certainly not a career-ending thing. For an error of this scale, I think that a strong argument can be made that he should choose a different career.
I mean, as long as the internet is mean to you about it. Now, if the internet isn’t mean enough you should be penalized some amount that accounts for how mean the internet was.
In fact, I think doctors that amputate the wrong limb should not face malpractice lawsuits if the greater metropolitan areas local news station ran more than 2 stories about it reaching a population of at least 2 million viewers.
That only works based on prior evidence. Either somebody prior to the potential violation was penalized or the weren't; either people fear, based on the prior, suffering the same penalty, or no worries mate the prior offender wasn't punished.
This isn't a kid faking his school homework. The purpose of this writing is not to assess the skill of the lawyer.