• A personal injury lawyer apologized for filing court documents with fabricated quotations.
• The lawyer told the judge that he had begun using software from a venture-backed startup called Eve.
• The episode highlights a growing risk for the startups selling artificial intelligence to lawyers.

Lawyers keep getting burned by artificial intelligence that invents cases and makes up quotes. Now, some attorneys are naming the software they used.

Last month, a Louisiana personal injury lawyer apologized after submitting briefs that cited a real court decision but quoted passages that didn't exist. The mistakes appeared in two filings in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge and were flagged by opposing counsel.

"I'm trying to understand how I made this mistake," Ross LeBlanc, a partner at Dudley DeBosier, wrote in a private letter to Judge William Jorden on March 27. Earlier this year, he said, he began using an artificial intelligence program called Eve to draft pleadings. At first, he checked the citations often. "They were always correct when I checked them," he wrote.

That consistency gave him confidence, and eventually, he stopped checking, he said.

"I never thought this could happen to me," LeBlanc wrote, adding that he could not be sure whether the mistake involved Eve's software or if he copied and pasted something too hastily.

Jay Madheswaranm, Eve's chief executive, told Business Insider on Thursday that after a close audit of the case with Dudley DeBosier, the company confirmed Eve "did not hallucinate any case citations in this matter," including any fabricated quotations.

Courts have slapped sanctions on attorneys for filing briefs with errors created by artificial intelligence — often called "hallucinations." Last week, Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the country's oldest and most elite law firms, apologized to a federal judge over a similar slip-up.

What's new here is the blame game. When an attorney names the tools involved, the companies behind the software are put in the spotlight and could face reputational repercussions.

Legal software companies like Harvey, Legora, and Eve have raised billions of dollars on the promise that they can make lawyers faster — and offer firms a level of reliability that general-purpose tools can't match. If their software starts to embarrass customers in court, that trust erodes.

Damien Charlotin, a French researcher who tracks hallucinations in court filings, estimates that fewer than 10% of cases identify the software used. Many lawyers, he suspects, keep that part private because they're relying on free chatbots like ChatGPT or other off-the-shelf tools that may not be authorized for client work.

Last year, a Latham & Watkins lawyer defending Anthropic in a copyright lawsuit made headlines after citing an article that does not exist. The lawyer said the mistake stemmed from using Anthropic's own chatbot, Claude, which fabricated an article title and authors.

Eve builds software for plaintiff-side lawyers using large language models, helping them draft documents, map out medical histories, and send and respond to discovery requests. The company was valued at $1 billion after it raised a $103 million funding round about a year ago. Madheswaranm said Eve now processes more than 200,000 documents and other results a month — up around 100-fold from a year ago.

LeBlanc told the judge that he had been wary of the technology generally because of the "horror stories" about hallucinated case law. He said he was persuaded after Eve pitched the tool to his firm and assured attorneys it had safeguards to reduce errors. He believed the risk was limited as long as he conducted his own legal research and directed the software to rely only on approved sources.

Then, opposing counsel in the personal injury case pointed out his mistakes.

LeBlanc's apology surfaced this month in a separate case involving a trip-and-fall at a Lowe's store. The opposing counsel found hallucinations in a brief filed by Dudley DeBosier and included LeBlanc's letter in a request urging the court to expand its inquiry into possible sanctions.

Dudley DeBosier has filed a motion to strike opposing counsel's request because it says the cases are unrelated. The firm also indicated that a lawyer used Claude to help draft the brief in the Lowe's case.

It's a view widely shared across software companies and law firms that artificial intelligence can assist in research and drafting, but responsibility for the final product remains with the human who signs the filing.

Madheswaran said Eve makes that explicit in its contracts and onboarding with new customers. The software also includes features designed to catch errors before they reach a courtroom, though they don't always work. Some errors are harder to spot than others, he said. Confirming a case exists is easier than verifying a quote is exact.

As the legal profession races to adopt artificial intelligence, mistakes are more likely to be caught. Courts are getting wiser to the technology, and opposing counsel are adjusting their tactics. Instead of only attacking legal arguments, lawyers are scanning filings for errors that could undermine the other side's credibility.

Chad Dudley, a founding partner of Dudley DeBosier, a firm with about 40 attorneys, said it trains its lawyers to carefully review generated results and requires them to agree to use the technology responsibly.

For his part, LeBlanc said he hopes other lawyers learn from his mistake. He told Business Insider on Thursday that Eve helped him move faster under time pressure, but after the errors surfaced, he felt "sick to my stomach" and couldn't sleep.

"I'm responsible for checking everything, no matter what technology comes along," he said.

He doesn't blame Eve for the blunder. Still, he's setting the tool down for now.

"I feel like, given what happened," he said, "it's fair to have a cooling off period, you know, touch grass."

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• At law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. But timekeeping is a pain.
• The startup PointOne says it's using AI to help lawyers auto-complete timesheets and bill more time.
• PointOne raised $16 million in a funding round led by the venture capital firm 8VC.

Tracking hours is part of how lawyers get paid. It's also the bane of the profession.

A startup called PointOne wants to eliminate the most tedious part of a lawyer's job. It says its AI-powered platform passively tracks a lawyer's computer activity and uses it to complete timesheets.

The company grew revenue tenfold since July, says PointOne cofounder Katon Luaces, after signing up dozens of law firm customers, ranging from a global 1,200-lawyer outfit to solo practitioners.

Investors are taking notice. After making a small earlier investment, the Joe Londsale-founded venture firm 8VC is leading a $16 million Series A round for PointOne, Luaces tells Business Insider. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator also participated.

Founders are flooding into legal tech, betting they can turn large language models into products law firms will trust — and competing for attention in an estimated $1 trillion industry.

Jack Moshkovich, an 8VC partner, said the market is crowded with companies trying to help lawyers do work faster. That leaves more whitespace, he said, on the operational side of the business.

Luaces isn't a lawyer. In 2019, he was a computer science major and a Google intern as the company's researchers were laying the groundwork for modern large language models.

He saw legal work as a natural target for the technology because so much of it is repetitive and text-heavy. By 2023, he and his roommate, Jeremy Ben-Meir, along with a third cofounder, Adrian Parlow, started sketching out an idea for a legal startup. (Parlow left PointOne last year and joined legal-tech giant Legora.)

When Luaces asked lawyers which part of the job they hated most, he kept hearing the same answer: timekeeping. At most law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. Lawyers log the work they do for each client — often in six-minute increments — then tally those hours and bill accordingly. Many still track their hours in a spreadsheet or by hand on a legal pad.

PointOne's platform runs in the background as lawyers move between apps, then fills in time entries with the client, matter, a description of the work, and standardized legal codes.

Security and confidentiality are essential for law firms. Clients trust them with trade secrets and other closely held information, leaving little room for error from any software vendor.

When asked how lawyers feel about software watching them work, Luaces said their dislike of timekeeping helps overcome any discomfort. PointOne says it encrypts stored sensitive data, does not train models on firm data, and gives firms the option to use models in a private Azure environment.

For lawyers, "this is like magic beans," Luaces said.

Time savings aren't the point

Law firms are still working out how to use artificial intelligence to work faster without hurting their economics. Software that saves time can also reduce the number of hours a firm can bill.

PointOne, however, is not pitching itself as a way to save lawyers' time. Instead, it says it can help firms capture time that would otherwise go unbilled.

Some share of legal work never makes it into timesheets. Junior lawyers may undercount how long a task took, either because they're still learning or because they're embarrassed. More often, Luaces said, lawyers skip billing for small tasks because logging them takes almost as long as the work itself.

A lawyer might spend four minutes writing a client email. "I can either spend the next four minutes creating the time entry for it, or I can do more work," Luaces said. "Nine out of 10 times, everyone chooses to do more work."

He says the company's software can increase revenue by capturing billable time that would otherwise be lost.

PointOne isn't the only company making such promises. Its biggest competitor, Laurel, provides professional services firms with analytics about their operations, including time. It's raised over $150 million in funding since 2016, compared to PointOne's $20 million total.

PointOne wants to position itself for a broader shift in how legal work gets priced. Corporate clients are pushing back on soaring legal bills, and as artificial intelligence threatens to trim billable hours, firms are under pressure to test alternatives to hourly billing, including fixed fees for certain matters. Luaces said PointOne's data can help firms better understand the labor behind a matter, which in turn can help them price that work more precisely.

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• Anthropic's Jeff Bleich says AI will end the billable hour's dominance in legal billing.
• Billable hours mean lawyers get paid more when they spend more time on work.
• But AI tools eliminate "tedious" work, which devalues the time lawyers spend overall, Bleich said.

The billable hour's time is approaching midnight, according to Anthropic's top lawyer.

"I don't think the billable hour is the solution, and we've known it for a long time," Jeff Bleich, the AI company's general counsel, said Thursday.

Speaking at the American Bar Association's White Collar Crime Institute in San Diego, Bleich said that artificial intelligence tools are eliminating the need for companies to hire armies of lawyers to do lucrative yet "tedious" work.

"Now we've got a technology that's going to eliminate the sorts of things that allow people to become wealthy off of tedious work," Bleich said on the panel, alongside top lawyers at Google, IBM, and Liberty Mutual. "That was not what lawyers are trained to do, and not what we ultimately look to lawyers for."

The much-maligned billable hour is the standard method that law firms use to bill their clients.

Attorneys track the work done for each client, often in six-minute increments, tally them up, and charge their clients accordingly.

While the billable hour has been useful to help companies and other clients understand what they are paying lawyers for, it has also "created a wedge," Bleich said.

Under the current system, "the interests of firms are at odds with the interests of their clients," he said. Companies want lawyers to resolve problems quickly, but law firms get paid more when the work takes longer.

"Clients want you to solve the problem as efficiently as possible and with as little drama as possible," Bleich said. "And if you're a company, the bigger the case gets, and the more dramatic it gets, and the more complicated it gets, and the more work that has to be done — the more lucrative it is."

The other panelists largely agreed with Bleich's remarks.

"The value is no longer you putting in time," said Damon Hart, the top lawyer at Liberty Mutual. "The value is your strategy, your results."

Anne Robinson, IBM's general counsel, told the audience that she's open to working with them to figure out more creative billing methods.

"I'm open to firms coming and saying, 'I'd really like to work with you on this matter or this type of work, I get that the billable hour model is not one of aligned incentives, and so let's sit down and talk about what you expect as far as outcomes and how we can both get there in a way that reflects your pressures and your priorities,'" Robinson said.

Bleich said he still values the work of outside law firms, but wants them to find an alternative to the billable hour that works for everyone.

"We're not going to sort of cheap out and starve you," Bleich said. "On the other hand, you have to have an economic model that works. And the firms that adapt to that faster and better will be leapfrogging other firms, because they'll be more attractive to work with."

Bleich's comments come at a critical moment for Anthropic, which sued federal agencies this week after the Trump administration effectively blacklisted it following the collapse of contract negotiations with the Department of Defense.

In the lawsuit, Anthropic is represented by WilmerHale, one of the law firms that Trump targeted last year with an executive order that was quickly blocked by a federal judge.

"I like firms that show some spine," Bleich said following the panel, when asked about using law firms that fought back against Trump's executive orders targeting them. He declined to comment on the lawsuit itself.

WilmerHale is distinguished in another way: Reginald Heber Smith, who in the early 20th century managed the Big Law firm — then called Hale and Dorr — is widely credited with inventing the billable hour.