From Judge Paul Engelmayer’s order on Thursday JG v. NY City Dep’t of Ed. (SDNY), which decides the attorney’s fees to be awarded under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act:
Law firm Cuddy also claims that the requested hourly rates are supported by feedback received from the artificial intelligence tool “ChatGPT-4”.
In fairness, Cuddy Law Firm does not predominantly rely on ChatGPT-4 in supporting these billing rates. Instead, it presents ChatGPT-4 as a “cross-check” to support the problematic sources above. The Court therefore does not need to dwell at length on this point.
Suffice it to say, law firm Cuddy’s invocation of ChatGPT as an aid to its aggressive commission offering is wholly and uncharacteristically unconvincing. As the firm should have understood, viewing ChatGPT’s findings as a useful indicator of the reasonable billing rate for the work of a lawyer with a particular background performing a bespoke assignment for a client in a niche practice area is was wrong at the time.
In two recent cases, Second Circuit courts have rebuked the attorney for relying on ChatGPT, where ChatGPT has been shown to be unable to distinguish between real and fictitious case citations. In Mata v. Avianca, Inc., Judge Castel sanctioned lawyers who “shirked their responsibilities when they submitted non-existent judicial opinions with false citations and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.” It’s inside Park vs. Kimthe Second Circuit referred an attorney to the Circuit Grievance Committee for further investigation after finding that his brief relied on “nonexistent authority” generated by ChatGPT.
By arguing here that ChatGPT supports payment of the fee it solicits, the Cuddy Law Firm does not identify the inputs on which ChatGPT relied. He does not reveal whether any of these were equally imaginary. It does not disclose whether ChatGPT has considered a very real and relevant data point somewhere: the uniform block of precedents, reviewed below, in which courts in this district and circuit have rejected as excessive the billing rates that the Cuddy law firm is urging for his timekeepers.
The Court therefore rejects out of hand ChatGPT’s findings regarding appropriate billing rates in this case. Barring a paradigm shift in the reliability of this tool, the Cuddy law firm would be wise to remove references to ChatGPT from future payment requests.