By Steve Levy
As artificial intelligence platforms become more and more ubiquitous, there’s an unsettling trend in UDRP cases involving not only falsified evidence, but also falsified case citations in pleadings. The most recent example involved a dispute between former business partners over who owned the domain name at issue. Since the domain name was first registered at a time when the parties were jointly operating a business, the panel found that it was not done in bad faith at that time.
However, this was just the beginning of problems for the self-represented Complainant. After finding that the “Complainant should have known that its case was exceedingly shaky, given the Parties’ history”, the panel found that it had engaged in reverse domain name hijacking (“RDNH”), noting that “Complainant cited several nonexistent cases”. And it wasn’t just a one-off, innocent mistake. The decision says that the “sheer quantity of fake case citations compels something more than a shrug” and it referenced “some recent instances where lawyers have been caught citing fake cases to courts of law in the United States, and in these instances it has been claimed that Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) programs were used by the lawyers, and the work product thereby obtained was rife with so-called AI hallucinations.” It then postulated that “Perhaps that is what happened here.”
Even though the Complainant was self-represented, the Complaint contained “massive and misleading errors” and was apparently submitted without doing even some measure of verification that the cases cited were actually genuine.
Although AI has been highly prominent in the news for the past couple of years, and stories have been featured of lawyers getting into trouble by submitting AI-generated pleadings in courts, it seems that the message still hasn’t reached all quarters. The economics of UDRP cases for large law firms doesn’t always add up and self-represented parties may lack the skill for the endeavor so there may be a temptation to use AI as a shortcut. But, as the above story illustrates, this approach can be a recipe for disaster. The far better road to success is the use of experienced UDRP professionals with a strong track record of successful outcomes for their clients.