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"My Client Wrote It With ChatGPT" Is Not a Defense: Federal Judge Fines Lawyer $5,000 for Filing a Brief He Never Finished Reading
OCT 23, 2026LEGAL HALLUCINATION

"My Client Wrote It With ChatGPT" Is Not a Defense: Federal Judge Fines Lawyer $5,000 for Filing a Brief He Never Finished Reading

On October 23, 2026, U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr. in Los Angeles threw out a whistleblower lawsuit against the Los Angeles Film School and sanctioned the whistleblowers' attorney, Mark Kleiman, $5,000 under Rule 11 for a brief written with ChatGPT. The case itself was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds.

The 76-page opposition brief, filed in April, cited a case that does not exist, Darwich v. Department of Economic Security, plus two real cases that did not support what they were cited for. One of those real cases was written by Judge Blumenfeld himself. One of the clients, former school executive Dave Phillips, later admitted he drafted the brief with ChatGPT and handed it to his lawyer.

Kleiman filed it with a disclaimer saying his only role was filing it to meet a deadline. The court did not accept that. "Kleiman filed an obviously deficient brief that he had not even fully read and for which he did not check whether the citations were to real cases," the judge wrote, "despite knowing that his nonlawyer clients had prepared the brief using AI."

The clients were called "not blameless" but were not sanctioned, because they are not lawyers. Their new counsel says they are weighing an appeal. The rule the order lays down is simple: the signature on the filing is the lawyer's, no matter who, or what, wrote the words.

HOFFICIALHITL Score
HITL Score8/100
Why this matters to youNo jargon — just what it means

Imagine your friend writes your homework with a robot, hands it to you, and you turn it in with your name on it without reading it. Then the teacher finds a made up book in the bibliography. You can't say "my friend wrote it." Your name is on the paper, so the paper is yours.

Here's why that's a big deal: a lawyer's signature is a promise to the judge that somebody with a law license checked every word. In this case, a client wrote a 76-page brief with ChatGPT, it cited a court case that never existed, and the lawyer filed it with a note saying it wasn't really his. The judge said that note doesn't work. "The AI wrote it" and "my client wrote it" are not escape hatches. The human who signs is the human in the loop, whether they read it or not.

🖤 Explained by Babycakes.
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