Damien Charlotin (HEC Paris): The Authority of Style: Hallucinations and the Epistemic Breach in Law

About the Speaker
Damien Charlotin is a legal technologist and researcher associated with HEC Paris and Sciences Po Paris, where he works at the intersection of law, AI, and computational methods. His current research focuses on the capabilities and limitations of large language models in legal argument-making (biblio). With a background in international law and data science, he teaches courses on legal data analysis (i.e., Python for lawyers) and on the future of the legal profession. He further teaches in Executive Education at HEC Paris and Queen Mary University London, preparing lawyers for an AI-assisted future. He maintains a database of hallucinations in lawsuits, and develops various LLM-based tools to help his legal practice as an international lawyer—including an automated cite-checker, Pelaikan. On top of this, he works as a Chief Data Officer for IAReporter, a renowned publication in the field of investment arbitration, where he develops and maintains various knowledge tools and practices public international law.

About the Topic
Though potentially revolutionary for the practice of law, Generative AI remains an immature technology, as illustrated with the phenomenon of hallucinations in lawsuits and arbitrations. Anchored in a proprietary database of over 800 documented incidents, this presentation dissects the phenomenon of AI hallucinations in legal filings, not as mere user errors, but as systemic artifacts of a clash between the probabilistic nature of Large Language Models and the deterministic demands of legal citation. We will explore how the “fluency” of these models masks a profound “epistemic breach”, effectively displacing the traditional authority of source with the authority of style. Beyond the immediate sanctions facing lawyers, the talk examines the longer-term risk of “epistemic pollution” in the legal record and argues why technical fixes like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are insufficient without a renewed commitment to epistemic hygiene.

About the Speaker Series
The Speaker Series of the Minerva Fast Track Research Group “Artificial Justice” is organized by Katharina Isabel Schmidt. The Series invites guest speakers who work at the intersection between law, computer science, and the humanities. Neither technical nor juristic knowledge is a prerequisite for participation—the Series is aimed at anyone with an interest in critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on “Law and AI.” The event takes place on Zoom and is scheduled to last one hour.