A federal judge has come down hard on a Loxley attorney, months after learning the lawyer had used an artificial intelligence program to draft a court filing riddled with fabricated case citations.
U.S. District Judge Terry Moorer issued an 18-page order fining attorney James Johnson and directing him to notify his current and future clients of the sanction. Moorer acknowledged that lawyers and judges alike can make honest mistakes, but wrote that Johnson’s conduct went well beyond that.
“The Court further has no difficulty finding that Mr. Johnson’s misconduct was more than mere recklessness. … The insertion of bogus citations is not a mere typographical error, nor the subject of reasonable debate,” Moorer wrote. “It is just wrong.”
Ian Rosental, an attorney representing Johnson, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
The episode centers on a filing that asked for a postponement of a federal drug trial. Johnson, who practices law in Loxley, admitted during a July hearing that an AI program he used to draft the filing had cited cases that do not exist.
Moorer ordered Johnson to pay a $5,000 fine and to file a copy of the sanctions order in all of his pending cases, as well as in any new cases he takes on over the next 12 months in every jurisdiction where he is licensed to practice. The judge also directed the clerk of the federal court in Mobile to forward a copy of the order to the general counsel of the Alabama State Bar and to the chief judges of Alabama’s Middle and Northern federal districts.
Moorer additionally referred Johnson to the court’s advisory panel to determine whether he should be removed from the roster of lawyers eligible to receive court-appointed criminal cases.
An ‘epidemic’ of AI-generated fake cases
Johnson is far from the first lawyer nationally to run into trouble over AI-generated errors. False citations produced by artificial intelligence programs have become common enough to earn their own nickname: “hallucinations.”
Moorer’s order cited more than a dozen similar cases from courts around the country, noting that his list represented “only a small segment” of what he found in his research. He wrote that the problem has drawn extensive coverage in both legal and general news media.
“Yet, the improper use of generative AI is a problem that sadly is not going away despite the general knowledge in the legal community that AI can hallucinate and make up cases. … Somehow the message still has not been hammered home as the epidemic of citing fake cases continues unabated,” Moorer wrote.
He said that reasoning was part of why he layered additional sanctions on top of the monetary fine.
“It has become clear that basic reprimands and small fines are not sufficient to deter this type of misconduct because if it were, we would not be here,” the judge wrote.
The filing error occurred in a high-profile federal drug case that has drawn heavy media coverage, in part because of sensational allegations that children were used as couriers. The case first gained public attention when Mobile County sheriff’s deputies reported finding a 3-year-old with a backpack full of drugs.
Prosecutors allege Johnson’s client, Glennie Antonio McGee, ran the drug distribution operation. The case went to trial in June, but Moorer declared a mistrial after becoming concerned that the slow pace of proceedings threatened the availability of jurors. The case was set to be retried during the last week of July, which prompted Johnson’s postponement request — the filing that ultimately contained the fabricated citations. Johnson also represented McGee in a separate federal indictment alleging that McGee participated in a conspiracy, led by his wife, to defraud the government of COVID-19 relief funds and other aid.
After federal prosecutors alerted the court that Johnson’s filing referenced “nonexistent cases,” Moorer launched his own review and concluded that the cited cases either did not exist, did not match the names referenced, or had no relation to the issues at hand.
Johnson acknowledged the mistake and told the judge he had been pressed for time while visiting a family member at an out-of-state hospital when he drafted the filing using a Microsoft program called Ghostwriter Legal. He said he did not realize the program was unreliable.
Moorer wrote that it did not matter whether Johnson understood the AI tool’s limitations, since it remained his duty to check the program’s output — the same way an attorney would review work produced by a paralegal. The judge noted that Johnson appeared visibly shaken during the July hearing when his client, McGee, said he had lost confidence in his lawyer.
“This was evidenced by his look of shock, dismay, and display of emotion when Defendant McGee indicated he no longer had confidence in his counsel,” Moorer wrote.
The judge ultimately allowed McGee to represent himself in the case.
Moorer wrote that Johnson’s error carried consequences well beyond the courtroom.
“The delay caused by Johnson’s actions harm the Defendant, the public, the United States, and indeed the Court as it results in a further delay in resolving these cases,” he wrote.