Attorneys for MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell have been fined a total of $6,000 due to their reliance on artificial intelligence, which resulted in a brief filled with misquotes and references to non-existent cases. Attorney Christopher Kachouroff and his firm, McSweeney Cynkar & Kachouroff, faced a joint penalty of $3,000, while attorney Jennifer DeMaster was ordered to pay an additional $3,000 individually. US District Judge Nina Wang stated that this sanction reflects the minimum necessary to both deter and penalize the defense counsel in this matter.
The lawyers were attempting to defend Lindell against a defamation lawsuit initiated by Eric Coomer, a former executive at Dominion Voting Systems. Coomer’s complaint alleged that Lindell and his companies were major contributors to unfounded conspiracy theories concerning election fraud in the contentious 2020 election.
This chastisement of Lindell’s attorneys follows a recent jury trial, where Coomer was awarded over $2.3 million in damages. The jury found that Lindell had defamed Coomer, leading to a payment order of $440,500 for Lindell. Additionally, his media enterprise, Frankspeech, was mandated to pay $1,865,500 in damages for similar claims, though the jury did not conclude that MyPillow had defamed Coomer.
The brief that led to the sanctions was submitted on February 25 as an opposition to Coomer’s motion to restrict specific evidence. Portions of Coomer’s motion were granted prior to the trial’s start. Despite claims from Kachouroff and DeMaster that they had mistakenly filed an earlier draft, Judge Wang observed that even the so-called ‘correct’ version continued to contain significant inaccuracies, including incorrect descriptions of previous legal cases. The original submission included nearly 30 flawed citations.
