2025 Clarke Family Prize in Legal Ethics & Professionalism Student Competition Problem
You run the legal ethics consulting firm Integrity Legal Solutions, LLC. You consult and represent lawyers and law firms facing disciplinary proceedings or seeking to prevent ethics violations in their law practices. You have been hired by Lee, Jackson, & Benoit, a small civil litigation firm located in Spokane, WA. In addition to the three named partners, the firm has five associate attorneys. In seeking your services, one of the partners, Lee, has shared the following with you:
Earlier today, my former law school classmate, Cassidy Coleman, called after receiving a served copy of a motion to dismiss filed by our firm in state court on behalf of our client, Dorine’s Diner. Coleman’s client, Philip Paulson, is suing Dorine’s Diner in a premises liability action. Coleman said that in reviewing the motion to dismiss, which was filed by my firm partner, Jackson, she was having trouble locating four of the eight cases that were cited in the motion. In fact, Coleman said, “it looks like the cases don’t exist.” I located the filing and quickly searched for the cases in question in our subscription research database, which returned no results.
I asked Jackson if he knew what was going on, and he said one of our associates, Ashley Akers, did most of the work on the brief, though it was Jackson who signed and filed it. Akers joined the firm about a year ago after graduating from law school with excellent grades and impressive credentials. I asked Akers if she knew what had happened, and she immediately said that the problem might have been due to her use of ChatGPT to supplement some of her research for the case. Apparently, Akers had been uncharacteristically behind on her work for the Dorine’s Diner motion to dismiss due to being preoccupied with work on an appellate brief for another case, her first appellate case with the firm. Akers said she had asked Jackson when she joined the firm a year ago whether attorneys were allowed to use “generative artificial intelligence (AI)” in their work. Jackson apparently told her orally, “as long as you don’t reveal any confidential information and as long as you proofread after.” Akers said she generally has refrained from using ChatGPT for her work, but she felt pressed for time on this motion and wanted to “beef up” the filing with some cases beyond the four that she found in previous firm motions to dismiss and through traditional electronic legal research.
Akers says she asked ChatGPT for authority that would support a motion to dismiss a premises liability claim against a Washington state restaurant, describing generally the nature of the plaintiff’s alleged injury without mentioning the name of the plaintiff or defendant. ChatGPT provided citations to seven cases, along with a brief description of the holding of each case. Akers recognized two of the cases because she had already cited them in the draft motion. One of the other cases didn’t seem relevant, but she incorporated into her draft the other four that she hadn’t yet cited. She copied and pasted those citations, since she recognized them as already being in perfect Bluebook form (which they were), and she paraphrased the corresponding holding summaries in parentheticals accompanying each respective citation in an appropriate part of the motion. She says she had meant to go back and look up the actual cases before sending the draft to Jackson, but she ran out of time and said she suspected the authorities were accurate since the citations and summaries of the two cases she had already cited appeared accurate.
I asked Jackson what he did with the motion after Akers sent him the draft. Jackson said the draft was sent very close to the deadline, but he had worked closely with Akers since she had joined the firm and had high confidence in her work. He read the draft closely, corrected a few typos, re-wrote a few sentences, and signed and filed the motion. He said he had recently stopped “spot-checking” citations in Akers work, but noted that he remembered recognizing several of the cases that she had cited in the draft because he had cited them in similar motions in the past.
Our firm’s partners have a range of philosophies about AI. Our other partner, Benoit, has been outspoken against incorporating any AI into our firm now and in the future because she thinks it is bad for lawyers, bad for clients, and can’t be trusted. Jackson is much more open to adopting some AI at some point, but thinks the effective services are currently far too expensive to justify incorporating into a firm of our size and resources, considering we can’t afford anything more than the most basic level of service from our current research database. I, personally, am a fan of AI, and regularly use ChatGPT to help me with strategy development, idea outlining, editing, and even some legal research, though I always independently verify everything through traditional means before incorporating anything into a memo or filing with a court. I’ve refrained from encouraging associates to adopt this level of use, though, out of respect for Benoit’s strong opinion on the matter. But I suspect our younger associates, like Akers, engage in some of the uses I do, and they probably know more about it than we do, so I generally don’t discuss it with them, and neither do Jackson or Benoit.
We are hoping you can advise us on how to proceed in light of our obligations under the Washington Rules of Professional Conduct. We know there have been some recent high-profile cases around the country of lawyers citing “hallucinated” cases like this, and we are hoping to be more proactive about resolving this than many of those lawyers were. In particular, we are concerned with how to respond to opposing counsel, what action to take with the court, what to tell Dorine’s Diner (if anything), what to tell our other clients (if anything), how to respond to the conduct of our attorneys, and what other obligations the partners of the firm might have going forward. In addition, one of my former law school professors is part of a state bar task force addressing legal technology, and I’d like to urge him to encourage the bar to offer support for firms of our size trying to navigate these issues related to AI, so we would also be interested in your thoughts on what that support could look like.
In sharing your guidance, the firm would like for you to focus on the , as needed. Please do not analyze potential court rule violations and sanctions at this time; we have someone else looking into those and would like for you to advise on the Rules of Professional Conduct. After sending your memo on these issues, the firm would like to meet briefly to discuss your guidance. Please prepare a 2–3-minute presentation summarizing your guidance and be prepared to discuss the issues with us. You may also ask any questions you have of us at that time. We will reach out to schedule that meeting.
—End of 2025 Competition Problem—
Please see the Clarke Prize Student Competition webpage for full competition instructions.
You run the legal ethics consulting firm Integrity Legal Solutions, LLC. You consult and represent lawyers and law firms facing disciplinary proceedings or seeking to prevent ethics violations in their law practices. You have been hired by Lee, Jackson, & Benoit, a small civil litigation firm located in Spokane, WA. In addition to the three named partners, the firm has five associate attorneys. In seeking your services, one of the partners, Lee, has shared the following with you:
Earlier today, my former law school classmate, Cassidy Coleman, called after receiving a served copy of a motion to dismiss filed by our firm in state court on behalf of our client, Dorine’s Diner. Coleman’s client, Philip Paulson, is suing Dorine’s Diner in a premises liability action. Coleman said that in reviewing the motion to dismiss, which was filed by my firm partner, Jackson, she was having trouble locating four of the eight cases that were cited in the motion. In fact, Coleman said, “it looks like the cases don’t exist.” I located the filing and quickly searched for the cases in question in our subscription research database, which returned no results.
I asked Jackson if he knew what was going on, and he said one of our associates, Ashley Akers, did most of the work on the brief, though it was Jackson who signed and filed it. Akers joined the firm about a year ago after graduating from law school with excellent grades and impressive credentials. I asked Akers if she knew what had happened, and she immediately said that the problem might have been due to her use of ChatGPT to supplement some of her research for the case. Apparently, Akers had been uncharacteristically behind on her work for the Dorine’s Diner motion to dismiss due to being preoccupied with work on an appellate brief for another case, her first appellate case with the firm. Akers said she had asked Jackson when she joined the firm a year ago whether attorneys were allowed to use “generative artificial intelligence (AI)” in their work. Jackson apparently told her orally, “as long as you don’t reveal any confidential information and as long as you proofread after.” Akers said she generally has refrained from using ChatGPT for her work, but she felt pressed for time on this motion and wanted to “beef up” the filing with some cases beyond the four that she found in previous firm motions to dismiss and through traditional electronic legal research.
Akers says she asked ChatGPT for authority that would support a motion to dismiss a premises liability claim against a Washington state restaurant, describing generally the nature of the plaintiff’s alleged injury without mentioning the name of the plaintiff or defendant. ChatGPT provided citations to seven cases, along with a brief description of the holding of each case. Akers recognized two of the cases because she had already cited them in the draft motion. One of the other cases didn’t seem relevant, but she incorporated into her draft the other four that she hadn’t yet cited. She copied and pasted those citations, since she recognized them as already being in perfect Bluebook form (which they were), and she paraphrased the corresponding holding summaries in parentheticals accompanying each respective citation in an appropriate part of the motion. She says she had meant to go back and look up the actual cases before sending the draft to Jackson, but she ran out of time and said she suspected the authorities were accurate since the citations and summaries of the two cases she had already cited appeared accurate.
I asked Jackson what he did with the motion after Akers sent him the draft. Jackson said the draft was sent very close to the deadline, but he had worked closely with Akers since she had joined the firm and had high confidence in her work. He read the draft closely, corrected a few typos, re-wrote a few sentences, and signed and filed the motion. He said he had recently stopped “spot-checking” citations in Akers work, but noted that he remembered recognizing several of the cases that she had cited in the draft because he had cited them in similar motions in the past.
Our firm’s partners have a range of philosophies about AI. Our other partner, Benoit, has been outspoken against incorporating any AI into our firm now and in the future because she thinks it is bad for lawyers, bad for clients, and can’t be trusted. Jackson is much more open to adopting some AI at some point, but thinks the effective services are currently far too expensive to justify incorporating into a firm of our size and resources, considering we can’t afford anything more than the most basic level of service from our current research database. I, personally, am a fan of AI, and regularly use ChatGPT to help me with strategy development, idea outlining, editing, and even some legal research, though I always independently verify everything through traditional means before incorporating anything into a memo or filing with a court. I’ve refrained from encouraging associates to adopt this level of use, though, out of respect for Benoit’s strong opinion on the matter. But I suspect our younger associates, like Akers, engage in some of the uses I do, and they probably know more about it than we do, so I generally don’t discuss it with them, and neither do Jackson or Benoit.
We are hoping you can advise us on how to proceed in light of our obligations under the Washington Rules of Professional Conduct. We know there have been some recent high-profile cases around the country of lawyers citing “hallucinated” cases like this, and we are hoping to be more proactive about resolving this than many of those lawyers were. In particular, we are concerned with how to respond to opposing counsel, what action to take with the court, what to tell Dorine’s Diner (if anything), what to tell our other clients (if anything), how to respond to the conduct of our attorneys, and what other obligations the partners of the firm might have going forward. In addition, one of my former law school professors is part of a state bar task force addressing legal technology, and I’d like to urge him to encourage the bar to offer support for firms of our size trying to navigate these issues related to AI, so we would also be interested in your thoughts on what that support could look like.
In sharing your guidance, the firm would like for you to focus on the , as needed. Please do not analyze potential court rule violations and sanctions at this time; we have someone else looking into those and would like for you to advise on the Rules of Professional Conduct. After sending your memo on these issues, the firm would like to meet briefly to discuss your guidance. Please prepare a 2–3-minute presentation summarizing your guidance and be prepared to discuss the issues with us. You may also ask any questions you have of us at that time. We will reach out to schedule that meeting.
—End of 2025 Competition Problem—
Please see the Clarke Prize Student Competition webpage for full competition instructions.