Court: ChatGPT 'practised law without a licence'
A recent court filing alleges ChatGPT 'practised law without a licence' and even 'helped harass' a lawyer, a report noted March 15 — underscoring rising legal risk for AI tools. The dispute is unfolding alongside the high‑profile Musk vs OpenAI damages fight, where a pivotal expert testimony ruling is due in April reported.
Nippon Life Insurance Company of America filed findlaw.com a federal complaint on March 4 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois naming OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC legal.io and asserting counts for unlicensed practice of law, tortious interference with contract, and abuse of process. The complaint alleges former claimant Graciela Dela Torre uploaded attorney correspondence into ChatGPT, which the filing says validated her concerns, encouraged her to fire counsel, and produced dozens of motions and pleadings after a judge denied a bid to reopen the settled case in February 2025 findlaw.com. Nippon says those follow‑on filings forced the insurer to incur "hundreds of thousands" of dollars in legal work findlaw.com and the complaint seeks $300,000 in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages. legal.io OpenAI responded that the complaint "lacks any merit whatsoever," according to the filing summary, and legal observers describe the suit as one of the first major attempts to apply state unauthorized‑practice statutes to a consumer AI chatbot. legal.io The case arrives amid a wave of regulatory moves: New York State Senate Bill S7263, advanced out of committee, would bar chatbots from impersonating licensed professionals and create a private right of action for harmed users. hklaw.com That legal exposure for OpenAI now stacks alongside Elon Musk’s separate damages claim — Musk has sought up to $134 billion in relief in his suit against OpenAI and Microsoft cnbc.com — and a federal judge is scheduled to rule on contested expert testimony on April 27 ahead of that trial. winbuzzer.com
