Uh oh.
Legal Tricks
A South Carolina man accused of pretending to be a lawyer has just had another allegation leveled against him: that he used AI to write his phony legal documents, local daily newspaper The Post and Courier reports.
The accused, Nathan Chambers, is alleged to have used his father’s name to pose as a real attorney — and apparently even went as far as actually representing real clients, in multiple courts, in person.
In keeping up this charade, Chambers had to file legal documents for the clients he was working with. One of these crossed the desk of Judge Danny Singleton, who said in a contempt hearing this week that he found that the wording of the document suggested Chambers might have used AI to write it.
Chambers declined to address the AI accusation, but he did say he was sorry.
“I never meant to cause the court any trouble,” Chambers said, per the Post. “As I’ve watched my father and sister throughout my entire life practice law and I watched my life go down the drain, I kind of lost my mind a little bit.”
Impostor Syndrome
Chambers had appeared in Singleton’s courtroom before. Not as a defendant, but as a supposed lawyer representing another man who, ironically, was also being held in contempt for giving legal advice to his fiancée in an ongoing case.
According to the Post‘s prior reporting on the saga, Chambers was listed as a contract paralegal in South Carolina. That doesn’t really mean much, though, because the state has no requirements for who can say they’re a paralegal.
It’s also unclear if Chambers’ father, who is a real attorney, knew what was going on. The law firm the father worked at, Truluck Thomason, is suspicious that both were involved, and has distanced itself from the pair.
Per the Post, it appears that Chambers has a history of lying about himself. In one LinkedIn profile, he’s claimed to have a degree in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, which has no record of his name in its attendance records. He has also been charged with impersonating a sheriff’s deputy in 2022.
Chatbot At Law
It sure sounds like this guy is a serial liar — but it’s less clear if he actually used AI or not.
Devon Puriefoy, a partner at Truluck Thomason, said that Chambers did attempt to access his father’s laptop to use Lexis+ AI, an “AI Legal Assistant” made by LexisNexis — but for whatever reason failed.
“We confirmed with our Lexis rep that he did not use our Lexis account,” Puriefoy told The Post.
It’s possible, of course, that Chambers found another way to use AI. Either way, there’s no denying that Chambers has incurred the ire of the judge.
“It’s disingenuous to the attorneys that took the time to go to law school, to take the bar exam to become attorneys, to do their work and make a living when you come in and want to be a cheat,” Singleton said in the contempt hearing, per the Post. “It’s a shame.”
More on AI schemes: Someone’s Sending Out Legal Threats From Fake, AI-Generated “Lawyers”
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