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Compiled by Citation Safe (Digital Empire Holdings LLC) from the court’s published sanction order (decided September 25, 2026). Quotes and case details come from the order itself — check the primary source before relying on them.

Sanction teardown · D. Massachusetts, USA · 2026-09-25

Aguilar v. The Crawford Group, Inc.

What happened

In D. Massachusetts, USA, a filing relied on an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    The brief cited Rodriguez for the proposition that defendants were barred from filing additional Rule 12 motions, but Rodriguez did not mention Rule 12 and did not support that proposition.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    The brief attributed a quotation to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. v. Jones using a fictitious Westlaw citation; the court treated the authority as fabricated.
  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    The brief cited Henderson for a proposition that the case did not support.
  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    The brief cited Correa-Martinez for a legal standard that the case did not state.
  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    The brief attributed a quotation to J&A Realty that the case did not contain and relied on a legal standard the case did not state.
  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    The brief cited a non-existent quotation from Glassman.
  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    The brief altered a quotation from Love without identifying the changes and mischaracterized the case’s holding.
  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    The brief materially altered quotations attributed to Neilson, Hanley, and Karle without disclosing the alterations.
  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    The Enterprise Opposition again cited Rodriguez for the unsupported Rule 12 proposition.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    The briefs cited a fictitious case identifying Dorchester Mutual Insurance Company as plaintiff; after searching Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg, the court found no such case.
  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    The brief cited Green Mountain Insurance Company for a quotation the case did not contain.
  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    The brief cited Citizens Insurance for a quotation it did not contain and a legal proposition it did not state.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    The brief asserted that the defendants cited Moore v. GEICO and supplied a fictitious citation, although the defendants had not cited that case; the court also noted the case’s procedural history was misstated.

Which AI tool

an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool. Note: Charlotin's public database records tool attribution only where a court order, brief, or reporting on the matter states it explicitly; "unidentified" or "implied" means the record indicates AI use but does not name a specific product — we do not guess.

Outcome

Adverse Costs Order; Pro hac vice status revoked (monetary penalty: 10000 .)

How Citation Safe would have caught this

Citation Safe runs three deterministic layers before a brief is filed: (1) does the citation exist against CourtListener's database of published opinions, (2) if quoted, does that exact language appear in the source, (3) does the cited case actually support the proposition it is cited for. Fabricated case citations fail Layer 1. Fabricated or misattributed quotations fail Layer 2 even when the underlying case is real. Misrepresented holdings — a real case cited for a proposition it does not support — are the target of Layer 3. None of these checks involve asking another language model whether the citation looks right; they are lookups and text-matches against the actual source, which is why a hallucinated citation has to survive a direct lookup against the authoritative source — not another model's opinion — to earn a VERIFIED stamp; our measured false-verify rate is published live at /quality.

Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/3141/Aguilar_v._The_Crawford_Group_Enterprise_Sanctions_Order.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).