Because it wasn't just a simple mistake. It was such egregious professional negligence that it calls into question not only the basic competence of the attorney, but also their basic sense of ethics.
To add onto this - the lawyers failed to verify their resources! This is something that every lawyer carefully pays attention to before submitting anything.
The fact that they did no research on ChatGPT, and they didn't verify the output from ChatGPT, is pretty bad.
They're being punished more so on how they used their resources, not for using ChatGPT.
Huh, I think it would? It's still really bad, the quality of the service the client got is still abysmal, and it's still ultimately the lawyer's responsibility. That much is certainly unchanged, it would also be considered a much more understandable mistake.
If they followed exactly the same processes (showing a screenshot of a text conversation saying "Is X a real case?" when challenged about the nonexistent cases) then I imagine they would have have been treated the same way. However they probably wouldn't have gone down that route, because they know "uhhhh I included those cases because my intern insisted they exist?" absolutely wouldn't fly. The difference is that they thought they could chance it because ChatGPT is a shiny, new thing that some people have a pretty mixed understanding of.
It needs to be a warning to the industry, which requires real consequences for those involved. A warning could encourage abuse by others - there’s little to lose except having to stop after getting caught.
