This case illustrates the peril. An attorney who, by his own counsel's admission, was sophisticated in his understanding of AI tools permitted a non-attorney staff member to use a public generative AI platform to prepare an appellate filing. The AI tool fabricated transcript quotations—attributing specific, inflammatory statements to a real prosecutor that were never spoken. The attorney filed the document without verifying its contents. When the fabrications were identified, he did not correct the record. He appealed this court's denial of the tainted application to the Supreme Court of Ohio without disclosing the fabrications. He proffered an AI policy that itself appeared to have been generated by AI, complete with unfilled placeholder brackets. Two months after a sanctions hearing, a filing in another court bore the unmistakable hallmarks of unchecked AI output, including a ChatGPT prompt embedded in the text of a legal brief. [...] An attorney who files a document containing AI-generated content is responsible for that content, fully and without qualification. The duty to verify, the duty of candor, the duty of competence, and the duty of supervision cannot be delegated to a machine.
Malikhi Coleman's lawyer applied to reopen his client's criminal appeal on the ground that the prosecutor had said something inflammatory at trial. A member of staff who is not a lawyer had put the case materials into ChatGPT and the output went into the application, and the prosecutor had said no such thing: the page the filing cited for the quotation was the court reporter's signature page, which carries no statements by anybody. What happened afterwards is why this one is here. He appealed the denial to the Supreme Court of Ohio without mentioning the fabrications, and when he offered his firm's AI policy as the corrective measure the court found the policy had itself been written by AI, still carrying the brackets where the firm's own details were meant to go. Two months after the sanctions hearing he filed a motion in another court with the prompt still in the text of it: "Would you like me to draft the next argument section ... so your brief reads as a seamless multi-print memorandum?" Decided 20 March 2026. A 2,000 US dollar fine, credited against the 2,000 already paid to settle the prosecutor's fee claim, referral to Ohio's Office of Disciplinary Counsel, six hours of continuing legal education on the ethics of AI, apology letters, and for two years a signed certification on every filing in any Ohio court that its citations are real and its quotations have been checked against the original.
