Three things about the above quote from the late Justice Scalia: First, it is good advice. Second, candor toward the tribunal is a requirement under the Rules Regulating the Florida Bar.1 Third, Justice Scalia never wrote any of it in his Liteky opinion.
Hardly a day goes by without news that a lawyer – and increasingly a client – has been sanctioned for using AI for legal research which contain hallucinations. Do programs like LexisNexis and Westlaw entirely solve the hallucination risk, or are family law researchers at risk?
Being a lawyer today means relying on artificial intelligence the same way we rely on human staff. AI helps with analyzing documents and discovery, as well as performing core legal tasks, from researching caselaw to document drafting. But make no mistake, AI models can hallucinate fake results. And, as any fan of the Terminator movies knows, AI may also lead to human extinction.
However, courts are dealing more with the hallucination issue, and the misuse of AI in court filings. Most of these cases, if not all of them, deal with citations to non-existent legal authority or the attribution of quotes to cases that do not contain the quoted material — produced as a result of what has come to be termed “AI hallucinations.” A legal AI hallucination occurs when a generative AI model gives you information that appears plausible but is in fact wrong, fabricated, or unsupported by the citation.
Clients are getting in trouble too. A recent federal case is a little different take on hallucinations. In the recent federal case it appears that AI was used not to hallucinate the law, but to hallucinate the facts. If an hallucination is an answer by an AI with made up cases, inventing facts would be a huge new risk in a high-stakes divorce.
In a recent case, the plaintiff filed a sworn declaration opposing a motion for summary judgment which contained multiple fabricated quotations, along with manufactured citations to deposition transcripts, as if they came from sworn testimony.
However, the declaration grossly mischaracterized the testimony and other facts in the record. At oral argument, the lawyers used some of these fabricated “facts” to argue to the Court that this case contained genuine issues in factual dispute.
More interesting, the client and his former counsel refused to accept responsibility for creating and submitting the declaration despite having had multiple opportunities to do so. The court ultimately ordered attorneys’ fees be paid by the lawyer and the client thousands of dollars to the other side as a sanction.
I recently wrote an article about the new players in AI, “Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAGs.” The leading AI legal research tools are RAGS. Empirical analysis of the leading AI legal research RAGS — like those offered by LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters — may still generate hallucinations in a non-trivial number of cases.
The Commentator article found that some studies have shown that RAG AI research models may still hallucinate. But it may be getting worse. An even newer claim has come to light. They call it “Semantic Collapse.” Supposedly, once your AI platform hits about 10,000 documents, the AI system starts treating valuable data like random noise.
In one recent study, four document sets contained around 300 pages of documents which answered test questions. However, each set of documents contained different numbers of additional, irrelevant pages, ranging from 1,000 pages to 100,000. An ideal RAG system should behave identically across all document sets.
But in practice, the added irrelevant pages tricked the RAG system into retrieving the wrong answer for a given query. And the more documents that were introduced, the more a wrong answer was likely to happen. The conclusion reached was that RAG performance tends to degrade as the number of documents increases.
There are some fair and unfair observations about the purported new study. True, a vector search may become less sharp at distinguishing highly relevant versus non-relevant documents as the volume of documents increases. But at the same time, the study was done by a competitor maker of a RAG system, which introduces the problem of bias.
More importantly, there is an inherent paradox when we use AI. It is called the AI trust paradox, and it is a phenomenon in which the more confident and human-sounding an AI chatbot becomes, the more we trust it. The problem is we can’t trust it. All AI systems, event the ones that seem reliable can get it wrong. While AI can increase our efficiency, we need to think of them as inexperienced assistants that need our guidance.
The U.S. District Court case is here.
My Florida Bar Commentator article on AI is here.
Forbes magazine is currently reporting on what’s become a standard topic to start the new year: is January really the “divorce month.” Why does January even have this reputation? Is it because January is when there is a big increase in couples filing for divorce and child custody?
While the new year brings on resolutions including diets, going “dry” in January, and an uptick in gym memberships, New Year’s resolutions can often include divorce. Some lawyers think that the first working Monday of the year is “Divorce Day.” In 2026, “Divorce Day” is Monday, January 5th.
Many couples stay together – with all the stress the holidays bring – “for the children.” But once New Year’s Day arrives, couples are free to think about fresh starts. Many law firms around the country have begun to call January the “Divorce Month”.
According to some research, divorce filings have peaked in late summer and early spring. Some experts believe that divorce is most likely driven by a domestic ritual calendar that governs family behavior. Often, August is the month for divorce filings following family vacations and right before school starts. The seasonal change of weather in the spring has also been said to cause people to act.
Interestingly, many people see a drop in divorce filings from Thanksgiving until the start of the New Year. Problems that already exist between couples become exacerbated during the Christmas holidays. The stress of spending time with relatives, cooking large elaborate meals, and the expense of buying presents can all be sources of stress and friction between couples.
New Years, under this theory, marks the final straw in an already tumultuous relationship and the resolution that they will not spend another unhappy year together. Inquiries of divorce lawyers can peak during January, but is it really just a comparison to the two months prior that saw a drop in divorce filings?
I’ve written about no fault divorce and statistics about divorce – such as the January divorce month phenomenon – before. The no-fault concept in Florida means you no longer have to prove a reason for the divorce, like your husband’s alleged infidelity with a congresswoman. Instead, you just need to state under oath that your marriage is “irretrievably broken.”
The official term for divorce in Florida is “dissolution of marriage”, and you don’t need fault as a ground for divorce. Florida abolished fault as a ground for divorce. Before the no-fault divorce era, people who wanted to get divorce either had to reach agreement in advance with the other spouse that the marriage was over, or throw mud at each other and prove wrongdoing like adultery or abuse.
No-fault laws were the result of trying to change the way divorces played out in court. No fault laws have reduced the number of feuding couples who felt the need to resort to distorted facts, lies, and the need to focus the trial on who did what to whom.
If you have reached the conclusion that you can’t spend another minute in your marriage, is January the best time for you to file for divorce? Filing for a divorce impacts your children emotionally and psychologically and creates financial stressors.
Living in two separate households is more expensive than living in one home together, and the more children in your marriage, the more costly the two households will be.
A two-bedroom apartment in Miami can range from around $1,900 – $2,500 in some parts of Miami Lakes/West Kendall to as high as $3,500 in the Brickell area. Three bedroom will naturally be more costly and harder to find than a two-bedroom apartment.
In Florida, there is an initial temporary order issued when filing for divorce designed to preserve the status quo. Realistically however, people separating households into two homes is a division which can leave both households with less than the combined previous married household.
So, is January the best month of the year to file? Possibly. Children are often starting the new school term in the new year. They are still home from school and will have enjoyed a holiday with both parents, and are still excited with their presents. Additionally, bonuses are often paid in the beginning of the year. January is here. Happy new year and new you.
The Forbes article is here.