Judges have long assumed that a federal prosecutor’s citations are more reliable and trustworthy than the typical legal hack. That assumption is no longer reasonable in the Pam Bondi era. U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District W. Ellis Boyle joined Renfer to apologize at the show-cause hearing, and locking the barn door after the horse has fled, DOJ circulated warnings to ist staff about AI use and referred the matter to the Office of Professional Responsibility. Why hadn’t they taken that step in 2024? Judge Numbers said he was “heartened” by these too tardy measures. Why?
The fake cases and references were flagged by the pro se plaintiff, retired Air Force colonel and longtime military lawyer Derence Fivehouse. Fivehouse, an experienced military attorney and former staff judge advocate, noticed that the government’s brief did not read like the sources it cited. When he checked the authorities, some language in quotation marks did not appear anywhere in those opinions or regulations. Fivehouse listed these discrepancies in his own submission as a pro se litigant, forcing the court to take action on the fact that the government’s brief was relying on false authorities.
Renfer has resigned, but the Justice Department fired him anyway. It needs to fire itself.
Ethics Alarms 
It is not a new principle.
Lawyers are responsible for what they submit to the court, regardless of the author was AI, a first-day paralegal, a homeless person who did it for a bottle of whiskey, or a feral cat.
“kegal” staff or legal staff.
Kegal exercise do have usefulness in the urnary and bowel departments.
Was this a clever metaphor ?
I panicked and assumed I had reviewed the post when I hadn’t.
“…check all your citations and do not hallucinate” He forgot to add that to his prompt.
It’s bad enough when a pro se litigant thinks AI will help him or her draft a legal document just as good as what they otherwise would have to pay a “law-talking” guy or gal to draft (it usually won’t be), but when attorneys employed by the Feds do it . . . good grief! We’ve had experience at the small law firm I work at with AI-drafted filings by the opposing side. (Wouldn’t be proper to name specific cases, though.)
According to Rudy Renfer’s Linkedin profile ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudy-renfer-41593866 ), he was hired as an Assistant US Attorney in Feb, 2009, and has been practicing law since 1997. I would have expected some fresh graduate to have pulled this stunt, not someone with nearly thirty years experience. Could Renfer’s disgrace here open his past cases to new review?
AH! I dislike LinkedIn so much that I didn’t think to check his profile there: I googled him and failed to find that info.
I use Duckduckgo to search the web. Renfer’s Linkedin profile was the tenth search result. This EA post was ninth. Bloomberg Law also mentions that Renfer has worked at the US attorney’s office since 2009. It was the only article I found that mentioned how long Renfer had been practicing law.