LA judge sanctions eviction lawyer for faking legal citations

A Burbank attorney who claims to have “evicted more tenants than any other human being on the planet” can add one more accomplishment to his list — fake legal citations.

Dennis Block, who runs Dennis P. Block and Associates, was sanctioned by a Los Angeles  Superior Court judge for a court filing that contained fake case law, LAist reported.

Judge Ian Fusselman ordered Block’s firm to pay $999 — or $1 below the amount that would have required reporting the sanction to the state bar for investigation and disciplinary action. 

In the eviction case last spring, Block didn’t just lose. Fusselman sanctioned him for submitting a court filing the judge said was “rife with inaccurate and false statements.”

By all appearances, the filing from April looks credible, according to the site run by public radio station 89.3 KPCC. It’s properly formatted. Block’s signature at the bottom lends weight. Case citations bolster Block’s argument for why the tenant should be given the boot.

But when Fusselman took a closer look at the brief, he spotted a big problem: Two of the cases cited in the brief weren’t real. Others had nothing to do with eviction law, the judge said.

“This was an entire body of law that was fabricated,” Fusselman said during the sanction hearing. “It’s difficult to understand how that happened.”

Block wrote in a declaration to the court, “There was never an intent to mislead the court and I do apologize to the court and opposing counsel.”

Six legal experts told LAist there’s a likely reason for the filing’s errors: misuse of an artificial intelligence program.

They said they thought Block’s filing bears striking similarities to a brief prepared by a New York attorney who admitted to using ChatGPT back in May.

“I think it’s virtually certain that the lawyer involved used some kind of [generative] artificial intelligence program to draft the brief,” Russell Korobkin, a professor at UCLA School of Law who recently moderated a panel on AI in the legal profession, told LAist.

“This filing has the usual hallmarks of what’s known as a hallucination,” added Jonathan Choi, a professor at USC Gould School of Law who reviewed the brief at LAist’s request.

He said hallucinations are a known problem in which programs like ChatGPT “tend to produce things that look convincing, but actually have no basis in reality.” 

Block declined an interview with LAist. In an email responding to its requests for comment, he wrote, “It is apparent that you are simply intent on publishing a ‘hit piece’ against myself and my firm.”

His website says the firm has handled more than 200,000 evictions. In a 2018 court case, Block claimed his firm takes “upward of 500 unlawful detainer cases per month.”

At the same time, Block’s firm has faced criticism from many tenant advocates, as well as some landlords. An LAist investigation of court records found Block or his firm have faced 12 lawsuits filed by clients alleging their cases were mishandled.

— Dana Bartholomew

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