Mike Lindell lost defamation case, and his lawyers were fined for AI hallucinations

Lawyers representing MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell were fined $6,000 after using artificial intelligence in a brief that was riddled with misquotes and citations to fictional cases.

Attorney Christopher Kachouroff and the law firm of McSweeney Cynkar & Kachouroff were fined $3,000, jointly and severally. Attorney Jennifer DeMaster was separately ordered to pay $3,000. This "is the least severe sanction adequate to deter and punish defense counsel in this instance," US District Judge Nina Wang wrote in an order issued yesterday in the District of Colorado.

Kachouroff and DeMaster were defending Lindell against a defamation lawsuit filed by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer, whose complaint said Lindell and his companies "have been among the most prolific vectors of baseless conspiracy theories claiming election fraud in the 2020 election."

The sanctioning of the lawyers came several weeks after a jury trial in which Coomer was awarded over $2.3 million in damages. A jury found that Lindell defamed Coomer and ordered him to pay $440,500. The jury also found that Lindell's media company, Frankspeech, defamed Coomer and ordered it to pay damages of $1,865,500. The jury did not find that MyPillow defamed Coomer.

The February 25 brief that got Lindell's lawyers in trouble was an opposition to Coomer's motion asking the court to exclude certain evidence. Coomer's motion was partially granted before the trial began.

“Correct” version still had wrong citations

As we wrote in an April article, Kachouroff and DeMaster said they accidentally filed a "prior draft" instead of the correct version. But Wang's order yesterday said that even the so-called "correct" version "still has substantive errors," such as inaccurate descriptions of previous cases. The original version has nearly 30 defective citations.

Wang wasn't convinced by Kachouroff's argument that the error-riddled filing "represents a clear deviation from what my practice has been," and was just a one-off mistake. Wang wrote that Kachouroff did the same thing in a different court:

Finally, this Court turns to Mr. Kachouroff's statement that "Doc. 283 represents a clear deviation from what my practice has been, and given the number of errors, it is just as reasonable to presume that the document could have been a mistake, especially when I commented during the hearing that this must have been a draft." But this assertion is belied by similar conduct before a different federal court. The Court takes judicial notice that, just seven days after this Court issued the Order to Show Cause, the same defense counsel team quietly filed two Notices of Errata regarding their briefing in Pelishek v. City of Sheboygan. Those errata demonstrate the same type of errors in the filed Opposition, including citations to cases that do not exist.

Wang found that Kachouroff and DeMaster "violated Rule 11 because they were not reasonable in certifying that the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions contained in [the brief] were warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument... Nor is this Court persuaded by counsel's contention that the 'correct' version was prepared and ready to file on February 25, 2025." Wang did not agree with the lawyers that the filing of the wrong version "was simply an inadvertent error, given the contradictory statements and the lack of corroborating evidence."

The lawyers were ordered to pay the fines by August 4. Lindell has said he plans to appeal the defamation verdict.