Michael Cohen unknowingly sent fake AI-generated cases to his lawyer

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Google Bard - chatbot application on smartphone

Michael Cohen, former attorney and fixer for ex-President Donald Trump, has inadvertently provided bogus AI-generated legal citations.

According to a newly unsealed court filing, Mr Cohen used the artificial intelligence program called Google Bard to produce the sham citations.

In his statement to the court, Cohen said: “As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with the emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.” 

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The fabricated citations found their way into a late November filing by Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, who was seeking an early end to court supervision for Cohen. 

Cohen served jail time in 2018, having pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax evasion and campaign finance violations.

He seeks to terminate court supervision based on his compliance with release conditions and time served.

Cohen believed Schwartz would verify the citation’s accuracy before submission, but Schwartz, without fact-checking, included them in the filing.

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Cohen clarified that a miscommunication occurred as Schwartz mistakenly thought Cohen had brought another attorney, Danya Perry, onto the case and assumed the citations were from her. 

Perry is now representing Cohen in the case.

The revelation came after Judge Jesse Furman, overseeing Cohen’s case, expressed inability in mid-December to locate the decisions cited by Schwartz and demanded an explanation, warning of potential sanctions. 

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In response, Cohen has requested leniency for Schwartz, characterizing the submission as an “honest mistake” and urging the court to exercise discretion and mercy.

This revelation adds a new layer to Cohen’s complex legal history, as he severed ties with Trump years ago and will act as a key witness in the Manhattan criminal case against the former president. 

The unintentional use of fake citations could potentially be exploited against Cohen in the upcoming trial.

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