A judge fined two attorneys for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell $3,000 apiece Monday for filing a motion riddled with AI-generated errors in a case that resulted in a jury finding Lindell liable for defamation over false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
Judge Nina Y. Wang, of the U.S. District Court in Denver, found attorneys Christopher I. Kachouroff and Jennifer T. DeMaster violated court rules when they filed a motion that featured numerous errors, including misquotes from caselaw and citations from nonexistent cases.
Kachouroff acknowledged using generative artificial intelligence to draft a motion during a pretrial hearing after the mistakes were found.
Kachouroff initially argued that the error-ridden motion was filed by mistake. However, the version that Kachouroff said was the correct one still contained “substantive errors,” including some that weren’t in the filed version of the motion, and it had timestamps that did not align with his claims, Wang found.
She said “contradictory statements and the lack of corroborating evidence” failed to persuade her that the AI-assisted filing was an inadvertent error, versus sanction-worthy negligence.
The judge also found Kachouroff’s responses, in which he tried to shift responsibility and suggested that the court attempted to “blindside” him over the errors, “troubling and not well-taken.” As Wang sought to determine if the AI-assisted motion was filed out of simple human error or was sanction-worthy, she wrote that neither Kachouroff nor DeMaster provided the court with “any explanation as to how those citations appeared in any draft of the Opposition absent the use of generative artificial intelligence or gross carelessness by counsel.”
Wang wrote that “this Court derives no joy from sanctioning attorneys who appear before it.” She settled on the $3,000 fines as “the least severe sanction adequate to deter and punish defense counsel in this instance.”
Kachouroff and DeMaster did not immediately return requests for comment Monday.
Lindell is not liable for the fines. Last month, he and his media company, FrankSpeech, were ordered to pay $2.3 million to Eric Coomer, the former director of security for Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, after the jury returned its verdict. Lindell, one of the most prominent pushers of the conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, had called Coomer “treasonous” and accused him of committing crimes.
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