Law firm AI filing errors

Sullivan & Cromwell, one of Wall Street’s best-known law firms, told a federal judge that artificial intelligence helped put false citations into a court filing. (reuters.com) The firm apologized in an April 18 letter to Chief Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn in Manhattan after errors appeared in an emergency motion filed on April 9 in the Chapter 15 case of Prince Global Holdings. (9fin.com) Andrew Dietderich, co-head of Sullivan & Cromwell’s restructuring practice, said the motion contained fabricated citations, wrong reporter references, incorrect pin cites and misquoted holdings. Opposing counsel at Boies Schiller Flexner flagged the problems. (legaltechnology.com) A court citation is the address for a legal authority, like a street number for a case. When that address is wrong or invented, judges and opposing lawyers cannot reliably check the argument. (canadianlawyermag.com) The episode landed in a bankruptcy court that was already handling an urgent cross-border insolvency fight tied to Prince Global Holdings, a British Virgin Islands entity. Chapter 15 cases ask U.S. courts to recognize foreign insolvency proceedings and protect assets in the United States. (bkalerts.com) Prince Group has drawn wider scrutiny since October 2025, when federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment accusing chairman Chen Zhi of directing forced-labor scam compounds in Cambodia and seeking forfeiture of about $15 billion in bitcoin. Chen Zhi has been charged, not convicted. (justice.gov) Sullivan & Cromwell said its internal safeguards were bypassed and filed a corrected motion after discovering the mistakes. Reuters reported the filing contained about 40 incorrect citations and other errors. (reuters.com) Judges have been confronting this problem for more than two years as lawyers use chatbots and other drafting tools that can invent cases with confident-looking detail. A database maintained by Damien Charlotin lists more than 330 legal decisions worldwide involving alleged or confirmed artificial intelligence hallucinations in court-related materials. (damiencharlotin.com) The Sullivan & Cromwell filing stands out because the firm sits at the top end of the corporate legal market, where clients pay premium rates for accuracy and speed. The mistake turned a routine cite-checking failure into a public disclosure in one of New York’s busiest bankruptcy courts. (bloomberglaw.com) The case now returns to the underlying Prince Global dispute, but the apology letter will likely travel further than the motion itself. It put in the court record that even a firm with formal controls can file invented law if no one checks the machine’s work line by line. (reuters.com)