Seriously? Lawyer Representing the My Pillow Guy – Already Known For Having Been Caught Pantsless on Zoom – Now Faces Sanctions for Hallucinated Cases

This story has all the ingredients of a parody on The Onion. Regrettably, however, it is all true.

In federal court in Colorado, Eric Coomer, a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems, is suing Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, for defamation, over Lindell’s claims that Coomer somehow rigged the 2020 presidential election.

In that lawsuit, Lindell is being defended by lawyer Christopher I. Kachouroff of the Virginia law firm McSweeney Cynkar & Kachouroff.

Last year, Kachouroff achieved his 15 minutes of fame when he got up during a break in a Zoom court hearing in a different election-fraud case and revealed to those watching that he was not wearing pants.

You might think that after getting caught pantless in court, Kachouroff would be on his best behavior from then on.

But now Kachouroff is in hot water again in the Colorado case. What did he do? You guessed it. He filed a brief rife with AI-generated erroneous citations.

When I say rife, I mean nearly 30 defective citations. I’ll let the court elaborate:

“These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; misattributions of case law to this District; and most egregiously, citation of cases that do not exist.”

The court went on to say that, despite providing him every opportunity to do so, “Kachouroff declined to explain to the Court how the Opposition became replete with such fundamental errors.”

Instead, he tried to explain them away as innocent errors or blame them on another attorney to whom he had given responsibility for cite checking, Jennifer DeMaster.

It was only when the court directly asked him whether he had used gen AI in drafting the opposition that he admitted that, in fact, he had.

“After further questioning, Mr. Kachouroff admitted that he failed to cite check the authority in the Opposition after such use before filing it with the Court—despite understanding his obligations under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.”

The court was not happy. “Mr. Kachouroff and Ms. DeMaster, like all counsel who appear before this Court, are bound by the standards of professional conduct set forth in the Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct.”

As a result, the court ordered the attorneys to respond by May 5 with arguments for why the court should not sanction them and refer them for disciplinary investigation.

Attorneys Respond Friday

On Friday, Kachouroff and DeMaster filed a response to the show-cause order and a motion for leave to correct their previous filing.

In it, the attorneys argue that the error-filled filing was a mistake, in that it was an earlier draft of the version they meant to file. “It was inadvertent, an erroneous filing that was not done intentionally, and was filed mistakenly through human error,” they said.

The attorneys do not deny that they used AI in generating the filing. But they say they had gone through it together and corrected all of the mistakes.

“There is nothing wrong with using AI when used properly,” they write. “At that time, counsel had no reason to believe that an AI-generated or unverified draft had been submitted.”

They also argue that the judge caught them off guard when, at an April 21 pretrial conference, he began questioning them about the filing.

“Defense counsel was caught off-guard with the Court’s line of questioning as he was unaware of any errors or issues with his response filed 55 days earlier, and had no reasonable opportunity to investigate any problem to be able to engage in constructive discussion about [the document],” the attorneys argue.

Two Takeaways

We will see how sympathetic the judge is to their response. However, in the meantime, I think we can all agree that there are two important lessons we can learn from this matter:

1. Always check your citations.
2. Always keep your pants on in court.

Read the judge’s order here: D. Colo. 22-cv-01129 dckt 000309_000 filed 2025-04-23.