Estate of Lane Caviness v. Atlas Air, Inc.

Issue

When appellate counsel signs briefs in the Eleventh Circuit that cite cases an AI tool invented, and then tries to withdraw the bad citations, does the withdrawal cure the violation or does the court still treat the filing as professional misconduct?

Rule

The Eleventh Circuit did not decide the question under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 or Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38. It grounded its response in the duties a lawyer owes as counsel and as an officer of the court: the competence duty stated in Model Rules of Professional Conduct r. 1.1, which requires "legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation," and A.B.A. Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility Formal Opinion 512 (2024) on generative AI. The referral mechanism the court used is 11th Cir. Rules, Addendum 8, r. 2(C), which routes lawyer misconduct to the circuit's Committee on Lawyer Qualifications and Conduct.

Application

Anthony F. Sabatini represented a group of commercial aviation employees who objected to their employers' pandemic-era vaccination, testing, and masking rules. The Eleventh Circuit describes the opening brief he filed as relying on at least eight nonexistent cases, one of them attributed to the Eleventh Circuit itself. The defendants identified the problem in their answering brief. Sabatini's response is what moved the court from irritation to a referral: in an untimely proposed reply brief he acknowledged that citations were "erroneous or unverifiable" and purported to withdraw his reliance on eight listed cases, but the eight he withdrew did not match a single one of the eight hallucinated cases in the opening brief, and all eight of the replacement list were themselves hallucinated. The court set that against the ordinary pattern it sees, which is an apology followed by sanctions, and said this level of repetition is rare. It reasoned that completely outsourcing legal work to an AI tool is not competent representation and is a dramatic violation of the client's interests, and separately that it harms the court, because a court reads briefs to help it reach the right answer and cannot do that when a lawyer signs whatever a machine produces. A footnote adds a further reason for caution specific to legal work, citing research that language models tend to echo a user's beliefs even when those beliefs are wrong, which is a particular danger for a lawyer whose job includes telling a client that the law is not what the client wants it to be. Note for anyone searching for this case: CourtListener indexes it as Estate of Lane Caviness v. Atlas Air, Inc., while the published opinion is captioned with Patrick Akerlund and the other employee plaintiffs as appellants.

Conclusion

The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the third amended complaint for lack of personal jurisdiction as to Flight Services International and for failure to state a claim as to Atlas Air. It imposed no monetary sanction and no fee award in this opinion. Its operative consequence for counsel was a referral: the opinion states that in a separate order the court, through the Chief Judge, will refer the matter to the Committee on Lawyer Qualifications and Conduct under 11th Cir. Rules, Addendum 8, r. 2(C). The opinion is marked FOR PUBLICATION and was decided on the non-argument calendar by Judges Rosenbaum, Grant, and Kidd, with Judge Grant writing.

By outsourcing his legal work to an AI algorithm, Sabatini violated his ethical duties to both his clients and this Court.

Grant, J., writing for the panel, in the opening section of the published opinion

It is rare to see the kind of blatant and repeated misconduct that Sabatini has committed in this case.

Grant, J., for the panel, contrasting this case with the usual apology-plus-sanctions pattern

Whatever the merits of artificial intelligence, it is no substitute for actual intelligence.

Grant, J., for the panel, immediately before quoting Chief Justice Roberts on caution and humility

Why it matters. This is a published federal court of appeals opinion holding that outsourcing legal work to an AI tool is itself a competence failure, not merely a citation error, and it shows that a correction can make matters worse rather than better if the correction is generated the same way. It also shows that a circuit's first response may be a disciplinary referral rather than a fine.

Read the full opinion on CourtListener

This summary was written from the opinion itself. Every quotation above was located in the text of the decision it is attributed to. It is a summary for public education and is not legal advice.

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