Steelman · slot B
The signature-means-something case
A legal-ethics observer would argue —A single garbled marketing line is trivial in isolation. But this lawyer was just sanctioned over AI-hallucinated citations in a filing — a brief drafted by an associate that he personally signed. Rule 11 exists precisely so that a signature is a representation of having read and verified the work; outsourcing that duty to a junior, who outsourced it to a chatbot, is the failure mode the sanction was punishing. Against that backdrop, a self-promotional page bragging about 'multi-figure verdicts' that nobody bothered to proofread isn't a charming glitch — it's the same inattention to what goes out under the lawyer's name, just with lower stakes. The pattern is the story.