Billed as evidence review: $475 an hour.

Standard of Care

August 17, 2026 · Ibid.

Woodcut-style cartoon of a packed courtroom: a paid expert witness in the box holds a soot-blackened gas detector aloft in one hand while aiming his phone at it with the other, his speech balloon reading 'What am I looking at?'. A plaintiffs' attorney watches beside a two-foot stack of printouts banded '350 PAGES', and 3M's pinstriped counsel slumps at a table of red-logoed binders behind a nameplate reading '3M'.

An expert witness hired by 3M used ChatGPT to write large portions of his report on a 2020 Houston plant explosion that killed three people. Discovery produced 350 pages of his chats, including prompts asking the bot to "show how 3M is 0% at fault" and, alongside a photo of the gas detector central to the case, "what am I looking at?". 3M paid the engineering firm roughly $90,000, with the witness billing $475 an hour; a deposition was paused three hours while the chat logs were handed over.