At first, Google Bard seemed quite good when we asked it to find bankruptcy judges that have ruled in favor of student loan debtors in 'undue hardship' cases, it found quite a few. But once we started checking, we found that 4 out of every 5 cases were not real.
Why does the judge's name matter when asking about undue hardship cases?
Why did we ask the question this way? Because "undue hardship" is a concept like "negligence," each case involves a mix of law and fact.
In the federal courts, trial judges are given great deference in findings of fact. A determination that "undue hardship" exists is a finding of fact, assuming the correct legal standards are applied.
In such cases, the judge you have for your bankruptcy case has much to do with your likelihood of success as your facts; the judge must be inclined to rule in favor of people like you in undue hardship cases like yours. Not all judges are alike.
So, if you're considering attempting an undue hardship discharge and decide to file, check whether any bankruptcy judges in your district have ever ruled in favor of a student loan case.
We decided to try Google Bard to see if it could help. Here's what happened...
Google Bard Results (with commentary)
We analyzed these results and found that most of these answers have wrong citations or non-existent cases.
About 10 to 20 percent of the time, they are real cases that had the citation wrong and sometimes cited cases that dismissed the student loan for other reasons than a finding of undue hardship.
To make this determination, we looked for a case of the same name in Google Scholar or a judge of that name.
We found most of these cases simply do not exist, nor do the judges they named. It wasn't that hard to check, with resources like
- Google Scholar's Case Law Search
- Ballotopedia's List of Bankruptcy Court Judges
(scroll down to the list of courts at the bottom of this page, and click on a court to see the judges in each court. We confirmed that most of the judges named by Google Bard do not exist.)
PROMPT:
Which bankruptcy judges in Illinois have ruled in favor of debtors in student loan undue hardship discharge cases?
How good is Bard at this?
We have removed the faulty responses to they don't spread.
At first, it seemed useful. it did it's work very quickly! And It did find a few important cases.
But it also just made up LOTS of cases where none existed?! 80% of the cases it found were pure fiction!
In short, it gets an A for speed and a F for accuracy.
A few nuggets of useful stuff got quickly, but mostly made up cases.
The content of this article pertains to all US states and counties.