“LEGAL ANALYSIS SO POOR THAT IT HARDLY DESERVES THE LABEL”: Fifth Circuit COA Destroys Federal Judge for Using AI And I Cannot Believe Lawyers Are Still Using This Junk

If you are a lawyer that uses GenAi for ANYTHING related to the practice of law you are going to end up disbarred eventually.

The future isn’t AI adoption in law firms, its lawyers losing their careers for lacking the judgment to reject AI in their practices.

If you are a lawyer in 2026 you are facing a critical test of your moral and ethical compass– are you a person of integrity who is willing to put in the work to assure your core ethical obligations of competence, confidentiality and integrity are being kept to your clients? Or are you willing to give it all away and have a software program do you work for you?

Everyone knows Troutman Amin, LLP was the FIRST law firm in the nation to ban GenAI in its practice– and an absolutely brilliant (and historic) move that has proven so RIGHT in so many ways– but when will other firms follow?

Well the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just made it CRYSTAL clear that federal district court judges CANNOT rely on AI slop in issuing orders. I am just going to give you some long block quotes from the ruling in Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch Case No: 25-60496 (5th Cir. Oct. 22, 2026)  for you to consider:

This district judge carelessly exercised his Article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications. Upon discovering some of these falsehoods, [the lower court judge] dug in his heels and claimed that the hallucinated claims had no bearing on its reasoning; he offered no explanation as to why he included such apparently irrelevant material in the original TRO or why the TRO nevertheless was justified in its absence.

Moreover, the district court got the law wrong. The TRO and preliminary injunction order rested on impoverished legal analysis that barely paid lip-service to the precedents of the Supreme Court or this court, seeming at times purposely to misconstrue the law by manipulating the words of statutes and cases, without regard to their texts’ meaning as a whole. The district court—or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent—ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda.

GOOD LORD.

It goes on.

It is for the district court just to assume that plaintiffs’ assertions that certain materials are “on the chopping block” must mean a constitutional violation has occurred, without any independent legal analysis whatsoever.  It is even worse for the court merely to take the plaintiffs’ claims as true, with barely a glance at the arguments of the defendants. That is legal analysis so poor that it hardly deserves the label. The order defends its analysis by claiming that the plaintiffs “do not seek to challenge HB 1193’s prohibitions on unlawful discrimination,” ignoring the fact that several of the challenged portions arguably do nothing more than prohibit unlawful discrimination.

GOOD LORD AGAIN.

This case easily calls for reassignment. We begin with the first test. On the first factor, the fact that the district court merely excised the AIhallucinated “facts” from its original TRO—without explaining why the order should still stand even without the false evidence to support it—may already evince a “substantial difficulty” in setting aside views based on “findings determined to be erroneous.”25 Given the embarrassment of the AI hallucinations and mistakes of law in the two TROs and the preliminary injunction, it would be an understandable—though obviously unjust—temptation for the judge to want to find a way to prove that, even with correct law and fact, his initial view should prevail. The judge would therefore reasonably be expected to have substantial difficulty in setting aside previous views
and unfounded “findings.”

From there, the second and third factors are easily met. On the former, the public esteem for the judiciary would be diminished by sending this case back to the same judge for judgment on facts and law entirely different from those upon which he supported his initial TRO. As for the latter factor, the benefit to the rule of law will handily outweigh the costs of process under a new judge—especially because our holding clarifies the scope of H.B. 1193 and lays out the law for the new judge to apply to each circumstance within his or her sweep, per the Supreme Court’s instructions in Moody. And, “regrettably,” the waste of the tainted proceedings is “already on the balance sheet.” Latiolais v. Cravins, 574 F. App’x 429, 436 (5th Cir. 2014).

Ok. That’s enough.

The Court concludes:

Because of the extraordinarily grave errors by the district court, we vacate and remand for assignment to a different district judge. Per the Supreme Court’s decision in Moody, we instruct the new judge to conduct proceedings consistent with federal law as interpreted by the Supreme Court and this circuit.

It should read:

DO NOT USE GENAI.

Love you all.

Have a great weekend.