J.G. v. New York City Department of Education

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

The Cuddy Law Firm also states that its requested hourly rates are supported by feedback it received from the artificial intelligence tool “ChatGPT-4.” Pl. Mem. at 16; see also Dkt 19 (“Kopp Decl.”). In fairness, the Cuddy Law Firm does not predominantly rely on ChatGPT-4 in advocating for these billing rates. It instead presents ChatGPT-4 as a “cross-check” supporting the problematic sources above. Pl. Mem. at 16. As such, the Court need not dwell at length on this point. It suffices to say that the Cuddy Law Firm’s invocation of ChatGPT as support for its aggressive fee bid is utterly and unusually unpersuasive. As the firm should have appreciated, treating ChatGPT’s conclusions as a useful gauge of the reasonable billing rate for the work of a lawyer with a particular background carrying out a bespoke assignment for a client in a niche practice area was misbegotten at the jump. In two recent cases, courts in the Second Circuit have reproved counsel for relying on ChatGPT, where ChatGPT proved unable to distinguish between real and fictitious case citations. ... The Court therefore rejects out of hand ChatGPT’s conclusions as to the appropriate billing rates here. Barring a paradigm shift in the reliability of this tool, the Cuddy Law Firm is well advised to excise references to ChatGPT from future fee applications.

Authorities cited in the passage: Mata v. Avianca, Inc., No. 22 Civ. 1461 (PKC), 2023 WL 4114965 (S.D.N.Y. June 22, 2023) · Park v. Kim, 91 F.4th 610 (2d Cir. 2024)