BriefCatch Names Josephine Petrick Chief of AI Products - AOL

Updated Jun 18, 2026

Former Fifth Circuit clerk and appellate attorney joins legal-writing platform to help guide its next phase of AI product development

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- BriefCatch, the legal-writing platform helping legal professionals strengthen the clarity, quality and persuasiveness of their writing, today announced the appointment of Josephine Petrick as Chief of AI Products.

As Chief of AI Products, Petrick will focus on building AI tools that enhance the quality of legal writing and help legal professionals use emerging technology with greater confidence. Her appointment comes as BriefCatch expands its AI offerings with RealityCheck, an authority-verification capability that helps legal professionals identify hallucinated or unsupported legal citations before filing.

"Josie combines deep appellate experience with hands-on expertise in building sophisticated legal technology," said Ross Guberman, founder and CEO of BriefCatch. "As lawyers increasingly look to AI to support their work and boost their careers, her perspective will help us build products that are practical, trustworthy and grounded in the realities of legal practice."

Petrick previously clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and served as a partner at an appellate boutique, where her work included Supreme Court briefing and complex appellate matters. She earned her J.D., magna cum laude, from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, now UC Law San Francisco.

In addition to her legal practice, Petrick has designed and built legal technology products focused on rule tracking and case monitoring. Her work has also included developing AI-powered tools, leveraging retrieval-augmented generation and other techniques designed to improve the accuracy and reliability of legal research and analysis.

"Legal AI products need to be built by people who understand both the promise of the technology and the professional standards lawyers are required to meet," said Petrick. "BriefCatch has always stood out because it is grounded in real legal writing expertise, not generic automation. I look forward to helping build AI tools that support lawyers' judgment, improve their work and meet the level of trust this profession demands."

To learn more about how BriefCatch helps legal professionals write with greater clarity and precision, visit www.briefcatch.com.

About BriefCatch  Founded by bestselling author, legal-writing authority, and trainer of all new federal judges, Ross Guberman, BriefCatch delivers expert-informed editing technology trusted by tens of thousands of law firms, courts, agencies and legal professionals. Integrating directly into Microsoft Word, BriefCatch provides instant, practical guidance to improve the clarity, precision and persuasive power of legal writing.

AI Faked Citations In More Than 2,000 Cases As Google Pitches Legal Model

Artificial intelligence continues to produce fake court citations as companies market their language models to law firms. Generative AI hallucinations were listed in more than 2,000 court decisions since 2023, according to a public database created by legal researcher Damien Charlotin.

Generative AI hallucinations were listed in more than 2,000 court decisions since 2023, according to a public database created by legal researcher Damien Charlotin. At the same time, Google just promoted its legal AI tool as a "complement" to legal teams, according to an Axios interview released Tuesday.

"I view it as a complement, not a replacement," Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google's general counsel, told Axios. "The practice of law will always fundamentally rise and fall on the exercise of good judgment."

DeLaine Prado added that AI already assists Google's legal team with various tasks, such as contract redlining, e-discovery and litigation preparation, and she said these tools could make it easier for small law firms to compete with larger firms, according to Axios.

"Last year saw, at first, an exponential rise in cases where people were caught hallucinating, but we have now reached a plateau," Charlotin, a senior research fellow at HEC Paris, told the Daily Caller News Foundation about the findings of his AI hallucination research.

The data currently consists of 2,022 cases of AI-generated content, such as fake citations, used in legal decisions across the globe from April 2023 through Sept. 5 2026, according to Charlotin's website. More than 1,300 were U.S. cases.

Google's AI models, specifically Gemini and Bard, were cited in a total of 10 cases, according to Charlotin's data. ChatGPT was cited over 100 times.

Most cases resulted in a warning, with fewer than 160 cases resulting in disciplinary action, according to the data. Most fines for these incidents were between $1,000 and $5,000.

"[A]ll things otherwise equal, free LLMs [large language models], especially those that can't search the Internet, hallucinate more as a baseline," Charlotin told the DCNF. "Unfortunately, that's also the kind of models self-represented litigants (the majority of cases in the database) tend to use."

In one of the earliest cases in Charlotin's data, two lawyers cited fake court cases in their legal brief that were generated by ChatGPT before being sanctioned by a New York federal judge.

"[T]he law firm of Levidow, Levidow & Oberman P.C. … abandoned their responsibilities when they submitted non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT," the court stated in a June 2023 sanctions order.

Google launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal in August to perform legal tasks that the company said regular large language models (LLMs) cannot accomplish.

"Gemini Enterprise for Legal includes an open ecosystem that extends its capabilities with specialized [AI] agents like Deloitte Legal Assist, bringing deep legal experience to a platform with centralized governance and control," Google Cloud said in a Sept. 5 X post promoting Gemini Enterprise.

By Mike Scarcella

Updated Fri, September 11, 2026 at 1:07 PM EDT

By Mike Scarcella

WASHINGTON, Sept 11 (Reuters) - A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said.

The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons, and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the AI program.

The filing "contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses," the court said.

The panel also said Aarons had "demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client." The justices fined Aarons $5,000 and said they will refer him to an attorney disciplinary board for investigation.

Aarons in a statement to Reuters said he had used ChatGPT to summarize the trial proceedings when he agreed to take up the defendant's appeal last year, and did not understand the degree to which AI could "hallucinate" facts.

The court’s sanction is the latest in a growing number of cases in which state and federal judges have disciplined lawyers for submitting court documents generated by AI tools without adequately vetting them. Some judges have also faced scrutiny over the use of AI.

Dozens of lawyers have been sanctioned for filing briefs where AI made up case citations or misquoted the law. Aarons’ filing appears to have gone further, containing fabricated witness testimony in a criminal appeal.

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