Defending the AI-Produced Complaint and Digging for Gold Along the Thames River

By David M. Saperstein

It began, as so many lifelong passions do, with the innocent curiosity of a child. In the 1970s, a young boy named Tim Miller[1] was photographing remnants of the ancient Roman wall with his mother Pamela for a primary school project about Roman London. On the South Bank of the Thames River, Tim spotted a man rummaging through the Thames foreshore, the portion of the shore exposed at low tide.  This “digger” had pulled up coins and old bottles from the mud. Fascinated, Tim waited until the man left and then sat in his abandoned hole, running thick river mud through his small fingers. Beginner’s luck smiled on him: he unearthed a fragment of metal that turned out to be a broken Victorian florin—a contemporary forgery made of silver and lead. It was not a treasure in any conventional sense, but it was something far more powerful—what Tim described as “a window into nineteenth-century criminality.” He was hooked.

What followed were years of tireless devotion to the adventure. Most weekends, if the tides allowed, Tim was sifting and searching, mostly alone on the banks of the Thames.  The stretch he worked was generous—coins, rings, clay pipes, mostly of Victorian vintage. The finds came frequently enough to convince his mother Pamela into joining him, a rare female presence in the almost exclusively male domain of mudlarking.

By his teenage years in the mid-1980s, Tim had become a recognizable face on the shore and was invited to join the Society of Thames Mudlarks—an elite group of veterans licensed to assist the London Museum with excavations. Now he and Pamela teamed up as proper diggers. She was in her sixties by then, undaunted by the backbreaking labor, though sometimes barely able to climb out of the holes they dug because of her diminutive stature. Tim carved steps into the mud walls so she could clamber free. Together, and alongside fellow society members, they unearthed finds that contributed enormously to the understanding of ordinary Londoners whose lives the historical record had long overlooked. Decade after decade, Tim searched—through the 1980s, the 1990s, and into the new millennium—losing count of the times mocking onlookers shouted down from the riverside walk, “Struck gold yet?” He had not. Not yet.

One day in the early 2000s, after nearly thirty years of mud-caked weekends and countless unremarkable finds, Tim’s eyes fell on something impossible. Lying on the Thames foreshore was a coin so pristine, so perfect, that it looked like the chocolate money found in a child’s Christmas stocking. He leaned forward, expecting to find candy foil or perhaps a museum replica. 

But when he plucked the coin from the mud, its weight was unmistakable. Gold. More specifically, Tim had unearthed a Roman coin depicting Emperor Diocletian, dating to 274–315 CE, in breathtaking condition.

Pleadings Produced by Artificial Intelligence

Even without a permit from the Port of London Authority, many of us practicing professional liability defense can feel as if we are mudlarking. The advent of artificial intelligence has made it possible to invent a 50-page “Complaint” with the click of a mouse.  While the standards for requesting a more definite statement are well known when a complaint does not provide sufficient detail about the alleged misconduct of a Defendant, it is less well known that the same standards can be used to protect a Defendant from an over-lengthy complaint.

A complaint that is too voluminous can be just as violative of pleading requirements as one that is too short and conclusory.  Under the Michigan Court Rules, “[e]ach allegation of a pleading must be clear, concise, and direct.”  MCR 2.111(A)(1).  The allegations that support the cause of action are to be stated “without repetition.”  MCR 2.111(B)(1). Similarly, Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(d) requires that each allegation be “simple, concise, and direct.”

Courts enforcing these rules have offered memorable quips. For example, in Robinson v. Michigan, 2021 WL 1388027, at *1 (E.D. Mich. 2021), the Court quoted the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, “Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words.”   In Tucker v Haspel, 2020 WL 7122084, at *2 (ED Mich, 2020), the Court held that it “is not obligated to entertain a civil action grounded only in the Plaintiff’s imagination.”  “Judges,” another Court held, “are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in” the record.  Tutor Perini Corp. v. Banc of Am. Sec. LLC, 842 F.3d 71, 85 (1st Cir. 2016). 

In the case of In re King, No. 05-56485-C, 2006 Bankr. LEXIS 3548 (Bankr. W.D. Tex. Dec. 14, 2006), a federal bankruptcy judge entered an “Order Denying Motion for Incomprehensibility,” citing by footnote a statement from the movie “Billy Madison,” in which a competition judge responds to the title character’s answer to a question:

In Gora v. Gelabert, 2009 WL 3233849, at *1 (W.D. Mich. 2009), faced with a 29-page complaint with 156 pages of attachments, the Court held that it was not “required to expend time and effort searching through large masses of conclusory, argumentative, evidentiary and other extraneous allegations in order to discover whether the essentials of claims asserted can be found in such a mélange.”  In Heinz v. HSBC Mortg Servs., Inc, 2021 WL 4942198, at *1 (N.D. Ohio 2021), the Court held that the Plaintiffs had not satisfied their “responsibility to edit and organize their claims and supporting allegations into a manageable format.”  Requiring the Court to do so would “transform the district court from its legitimate advisory role to the improper role of an advocate seeking out the strongest arguments and most successful strategies for a party.” 

My personal favorite analogy, however, goes back to the opening story of mudlarking.  In Kensu v. Corizon, Inc., 5 F.4th 646 (6^th Cir. 2021), the Sixth Circuit held that neither the Court nor the Defendants should be required to “fish a gold coin from a bucket of mud” to identify the relevant allegations:

Attorneys and parties defending a voluminous and incomprehensible, AI-written Complaint should consider asking the Court to leave mudlarking to the professionals, and demanding that the Plaintiff provide allegations that are simple, concise, direct, and without repetition.

David Saperstein defends nonmedical professional liability litigation, arbitrations, and grievances.  He is the incoming Chair of the State Bar of Michigan’s Professional Ethics Committee.  So far, he has never spent his weekends mudlarking along the Thames River.

[1] Tim Miller is Chair of the Society of Thames Mudlarks and a former journalist. This version of his story is based on the account on the website of the London Museum: https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/blog/struck-gold-mother-son-mudlarking-thames/.  Please heed his warning that you must have a permit from the PLA in order to go mudlarking.