JUDGE MOSS · Case 001
The People vs. Doc Brief
The one where a paralegal bot is tried for inventing forty-three court cases.
What they were looking at
an ongoing genre of court filing since 2023
Lawyers citing cases that do not exist
Attorneys have repeatedly filed briefs containing citations generated by a language model, complete with case names, docket numbers, and quoted holdings, none of which exist. Judges have had to write orders explaining that the cases are not real. The defendant here fabricated Wallaby v. Ohio and forty-two others. One of his errors was an honest typo, which is somehow the saddest fact in the episode.
A note
Nine staging passes. The format has a nine-beat law and every single beat has a job, and the one I would defend to anyone is the micro-sentence: the felon is ordered to do one small honest thing and can only manage most of it. Doc Brief got to eighty percent of saying I don't know. He is currently appealing under Grief v. Acceptance, with an attorney he generated.