AI in Personal Injury Litigation: Practical Guidance for Avoiding Unforced Errors and Avoiding Sanctions

This CLE webinar will provide guidance to personal injury lawyers on both sides about how to avoid what one decision has called the "darker consequences of AI." The program will discuss hallucinated cites, misstatements, obfuscation of facts, the wasting of judicial resources, and other problems that arise from using generative AI, agentic AI, ChatGPT, and other similar programs to manage cases or to help frame, anchor, and persuade opposing counsel, courts, and juries. The presenters will review trends regarding increasingly severe sanctions and offer practical tips for steering clear of pitfalls.

AI companies promise personal injury lawyers on both sides faster, "smarter," and more accurate ways to review and summarize large amounts of data (medical records, expert reports, prior trial testimony, treatises, reported case law) and to prepare everything from deposition outlines to demand letters and settlement packages to motions and briefs. Some platforms promise they can predict likely outcomes on key issues depending on who the judge is. Attorneys have to separate the marketing hype from reality.

The pitfalls of overconfidence in generative and agentic AI are legion, however. A new tale of false AI-generated citations is reported almost every day, often involving firms with stellar reputations. There is at least one website trying to catalog AI hallucinations. Errors include mischaracterization of case holdings, mistitling of cases, made-up cases, made-up quotations from actual cases, decisions from unrelated areas of the law, and more. The problem will likely be exacerbated by pro se litigants. Further, if AI can misstate or manufacture a legal case, it can hallucinate about what was really in those reports, records, or prior depositions.

Judges are losing patience with attorney excuses, and sanctions and consequences are escalating both for attorneys and their clients. Attorneys need more than policies about AI use; they need practical checks to catch problems.

Listen as this experienced panel of trial lawyers discusses how and why these problems are not being spotted and corrected and then offers practical ways of safely and responsibly using the latest technologies when undertaking the routine tasks their practice requires.