Compiled by Citation Safe (Digital Empire Holdings LLC) from the court’s published sanction order (decided September 2, 2026). Quotes and case details come from the order itself — check the primary source before relying on them.

Sanction teardown · B.C.S.C., Canada · 2026-09-02

Owings v. Campbell

What happened

In B.C.S.C., Canada, 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 petitioner relied on Atira Property Management Inc. v. Richardson as supporting his position. The court reviewed the decision and found that it did not support the petitioner’s position and was distinguishable, noting the reliance as an example of the perils of using artificial intelligence in preparing submissions.

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

The court rejected the petitioner’s reliance on Atira Property Management Inc. v. Richardson and dismissed the petition.

Additional detail

The self-represented petitioner admitted using artificial intelligence to prepare his submissions and relied on Atira Property Management Inc. v. Richardson, 2015 BCSC 751. The court reviewed that decision and found that it did not support the petitioner’s position and was distinguishable. The court characterized the reliance as an example of the perils of using artificial intelligence in preparing submissions, but imposed no sanction or monetary penalty. The petition was dismissed on the merits because the petitioner had not raised the address issue before the tribunal and had not shown patent unreasonableness.

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/3265/Owings-v-Campbell-2026-BCSC-1872.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).