Weird situation brewing in Florida–. Wait, we need to be more precise. Yet another weird situation brewing in Florida where attorney Matthew Weidner was contacted by another lawyer over a case that he had nothing to do with. And yet his name — signature and all — was right there on the filing.
Anyone ever partied too hard, blacked out, and started filing some pleadings?
No? Neither had this lawyer.
So how did his name get bootstrapped onto this case? After the plaintiff, U.S. Bank, learned that Weidner had nothing to do with the filing, it moved to strike the Answer and requested sanctions against the defendant. And then the whole story began to take shape.
The Defendant required immediate assistance once it was learned that the noteholder filed a foreclosure action in this Court. In an effort to bypass reviewing all of the local rules related to pleadings, the Rezidential Group occasionally utilizes Trellis Law by downloading numerous pleadings from their website and that derive from the jurisdiction or even courthouse. Those pleadings are then used as a template when preparing the appropriate complaint, motion, answer, or response.
Having found a suitable model from another case on Trellis, the Rezidential Group — handling the case pro bono — took the filing and edited the caption without ever changing the signature block.
Which is bad and raises concerns over the attention to detail the defendant received from the lawyers representing him. They didn’t even sign a document filed with the court… which we know because they left the last person’s signature on it.
But what about this phenomenon of lawyers taking improved state-level filing databases and AI to seek out substantially similar filings to lift?
This reminds of the copyright suit brought by a boutique firm against Winston & Strawn for substantially copying its brief in a case where they represented aligned parties. In that matter, Winston saw the Rule 12 motion filed by IP boutique Hsuanyeh Law Group and felt it applied to their client too and copied it in its entirety. The case settled, but at the time we wondered how lawyers could claim any intellectual property rights in publicly filed material. The key precedent cited in that case dealt with a lawyer lifting from an unfiled draft copy despite refusing to join the joint defense agreement — a critical distinction from drawing off a publicly filed document.
And bolting intellectual property rights onto public court filings seems problematic. Plagiarism is part and parcel of a common law system. If we aren’t — on some level — copying from what’s worked in the past, we’re kind of missing the whole point. Making the fine distinctions acceptable and unacceptable copying in the context of legal advocacy is a task intellectual property seems ill-equipped to handle.
With pro bono services — like those involved here — at least lawyers aren’t losing out on a paying customer.
Artificial intelligence advocates love hyping the technology’s potential to bridge the access to justice gap. Pro bono groups have long struggled to keep clients in their homes and AI can now dramatically speed up the process. But unless you trust Generative AI to draw upon a melange of filings to cobble together a Frankenstein job that almost certainly gets a bunch of stuff wrong, you have to rely on good old fashioned AI to go through the body of filings and find the right model. And then someone who isn’t getting paid by any client is going to take that model and substantially if not entirely copy it. Without getting comfortable with that level of copying, the benefit that AI tech can deliver for low-income clients remains mostly illusory.
Does the calculus for anyone change if the copying is done by a for-profit endeavor? Perhaps not as an intellectual property matter, but at least as a matter of “protecting the profession.” Most lawyers harbor enough ego and faith in their own indispensability to give up crafting their own writing outside of emergency motions they aren’t getting paid for.
But at some point, if the tech gets good enough, someone is going to start promising cheap outcomes in a well-papered niche practice hoping to strike it rich through duplication and volume. That’s going to be a regulatory challenge that the profession isn’t quite ready to tackle.
Earlier: Boutique Sues Winston & Strawn For Violating ‘Copyright’ In Rule 12 Brief
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
