Compiled by Citation Safe (Digital Empire Holdings LLC) from the court’s published sanction order (decided August 31, 2026). Quotes and case details come from the order itself — check the primary source before relying on them.

Sanction teardown · District Court, Hong Kong · 2026-08-31

Heung Long Sang v Wong Mei Yuen

What happened

In District Court, Hong Kong, 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:

Fabricated (Case Law)

The defendant cited the established proprietary estoppel authority with a misspelled case name and an incorrect report citation. The court identified the correct case as Thorner v Major [2009] 1 WLR 776 and found that the citation error did not assist the proposed appeal.
Fabricated (Case Law)

The defendant cited Jennings v Rice using an incorrect case-name and citation format. The court treated the authority as Jennings v Rice [2003] 1 P & CR 84 and found it irrelevant because the defendant had failed to establish the proprietary-estoppel requirements.
Fabricated (Case Law)

The defendant misspelled Greasley v Cooke as 'Creasley v Cooke' and gave an incorrect citation. The court identified the correct authority as Greasley v Cooke [1981] 1 WLR 1306 and found that it did not assist the defendant because she had not pleaded or proved the relevant promise and reliance.
Fabricated (Case Law)

The defendant cited 'Lau Sze Tat v Lau Sze King (2018) HKCFI 1357,' but the court found that HKCFI 1357 actually corresponded to HCMP 2482/2014, an unrelated dispute involving a moneylender and a second mortgage, with no apparent connection to the cited case or proprietary estoppel.

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

Applications dismissed

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/3159/DCCJ002842A_2023.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).