A federal judge in Colorado issued a scathing rebuke of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for allegedly submitting a court filing rife with errors because his attorney allegedly used a generative artificial intelligence program, citing several court cases that don’t exist. The filing came in connection with a defamation lawsuit against the pillow magnate filed by Eric Coomer, the former head of product security for Dominion Voting Systems, over the numerous false claims levied against him and the company by Lindell following the 2020 presidential election.

According to a six-page order from U.S. District Judge Nina Y. Wang, the incident began when Lindell’s attorney, Christopher Kachouroff, came unprepared to an April 21, hearing. During that hearing, Wang questioned Kachouroff about a number of errors in an opposition motion he had signed and filed.

“These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; misattributions of case law to this District; and most egregiously, citation of cases that do not exist,” Wang wrote. “Despite having every opportunity to do so, Mr. Kachouroff declined to explain to the Court how the Opposition became replete with such fundamental errors.”

Kachouroff initially claimed that he had simply “made a mistake” and accidentally “paraphrased” some cases, but eventually told the court that he had “given the cite checking to another person.”

“Time and time again, when Mr. Kachouroff was asked for an explanation of why citations to legal authorities were inaccurate, he declined to offer any explanation, or suggested that it was a “draft pleading,” the judge wrote.

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Ethics

Suit is ‘almost a word-for-word carbon copy’ of prior complaint filed by different lawyers, federal judge says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 15, 2025, 8:53 am CDT

Updated: A federal judge in Puerto Rico has said she is considering sanctions for a San Juan, Puerto Rico, lawyer who filed a lawsuit that is “almost a word-for-word carbon copy” of a suit filed by different lawyers representing different plaintiffs.

In an April 9 order, U.S. District Judge Aida M. Delgado-Colon of the District of Puerto Rico found that the conduct by lawyer David Efron “runs afoul not only of attorney Efron’s duty of competence to his client but also his duty of candor to the court.”

Law 360 has the story.

Efron told the ABA Journal that there was no plagiarism because the plaintiffs in both cases are cooperating.

Efron is representing San Juan in a December 2023 suit alleging that activities by several oil-industry defendants caused damages because of their impact on climate change. Delgado-Colon said Efron’s suit and some of his other case filings are similar to documents in a prior suit filed by about 40 other municipalities.

“Just a review of the first couple of paragraphs of the complaint is enough to warrant suspicion,” Delgado-Colon wrote.

The opening language, footnotes and citations are identical to the corresponding paragraphs in the municipalities’ case, with a few exceptions, Delgado-Colon said. They include “sprinkling some adverbs such as ‘incredibly’ at the beginning of a paragraph,” referring to the correct plaintiff and “breaking a paragraph in two.”

As pointed out by the defendants, Efron’s suit was so “rife with examples of plagiarism” that it refers to documents that were never filed, it sometimes refers to the singular plaintiff as “municipalities,” and it repeats typos in the other suit, Delgado-Colon said in her order. Efron also refers to “this class action,” even though San Juan denied bringing such a case, the judge said.

“Attorney Efron lifted not only the entire theory of San Juan’s case from the municipalities’ case but went so far [as] to use virtually the very same words and ideas, usurping the thought processes and legal theories a client hires an attorney to develop and perform,” Delgado-Colon said.

Delgado-Colon said Efron was also late in filing case documents and ordered him to show cause why he should not be sanctioned $7,000 for “untimely filings and lack of diligence in the management of case deadlines.” Efron had said he was in a federal jury trial at the time.

As for the alleged plagiarism, the judge said a monetary sanction on its own would be “insufficient to address the seriousness of the circumstance,” and she would be issuing a separate order to address that issue.

“This opinion and order should serve as a cautionary tale for all members of the bar,” Delgado-Colon wrote.

Efron told the Journal in an email that the judge had “rushed to judgment” without getting the full story.

“There was no plagiarism,” Efron says. The plaintiffs in both cases “are collaborating for the same cause in the interest of controlling climate change. The judge without even conferring with counsel rushed to judgment without knowing that counsel in both cases are collaborating.”

Efron also says the order “is not final and has been referred for further proceedings after we are given an opportunity to respond and show cause.”

Updated April 15 at 11:23 a.m. to add lawyer David Efron’s comments.

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A transgender prison inmate has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump’s administration over the constitutionality of the executive order he signed his first day in office directing the government to recognize only two sexes when housing federal prisoners, while also barring their access to gender-affirming medical care. It marks the first official challenge of Trump’s gender order, which the suit blasts as an “imminent threat” to transgender rights.

“Under the Fifth Amendment, sex classifications are subject to heightened scrutiny and are presumptively unconstitutional,” the complaint for the inmate, who is identified by the pseudonym Maria Moe, reads. “On January 23, 2025, Marie Moe’s publicly accessible BOP classification of her sex was ‘female.’ On January 25, that classification indicated ‘male.””

Legal regulatory authorities in Wisconsin on Tuesday filed a disciplinary complaint against a former state supreme court justice who criticized the Badger State’s 2020 election procedures.

Michael Gableman, a Republican, was hired by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, also a Republican, in 2021 to lead one of many investigations into the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and provide recommendations for how to make future elections better.

In the end, Gableman was unceremoniously sacked by Vos himself after calling for the elected official’s ouster in a primary challenge – and because his investigation, while sporting a hefty price tag, found “absolutely no evidence” of voter fraud and produced little of value.

“Here, I guess what we found out from this long and tortuous road is that at least for the first part of this investigation, there was no actual work being done,” then-Dane County judge Valerie Bailey–Rihn said during a hearing in July 2022. “The taxpayers are paying $11,000 for somebody to sit in a New Berlin library to learn about election law because they had no experience in election law.”