The single documented sanction on record in Attorney Discipline Board (Michigan) concluded with a Circuit Court Denied The Challenged Motions And Imposed $200 Per Motion In Sanctions (total $800) For Filing Motions Containing Fabricated Or Unsupported Authorities And Barred Further Filings Until Sanctions Were Paid; Grievance Administrator Filed A Formal Disciplinary Complaint. tied to ChatGPT as the implicated tool. One case is not a trend, but it establishes that this court has already surfaced the fabricated-citation issue on the docket — every subsequent filing in Attorney Discipline Board (Michigan) is on notice.
The rulings in this jurisdiction are consistent with the pattern Citation Safe tracks nationally: when a court identifies a fabricated citation, the sanction almost always follows within days, not weeks. The attorney of record — not the AI — is on the hook. Rule 11 (federal), state analogs, and inherent authority all support monetary sanctions, disgorgement, adverse-costs orders, and bar referrals independent of the tool that produced the citation.
Practical implication: any brief that reaches a docket in Attorney Discipline Board (Michigan) needs a citation-existence check before filing. Existence is Layer 1 — the case has to be real. Layer 2 is quote accuracy (any quoted language must actually appear in the opinion). Layer 3 is propositional support (the opinion must actually stand for what you cite it for). Every documented sanction below failed at Layer 1 or Layer 2 — the kind of failure that is trivially catchable before filing and catastrophically visible after.
Sample penalty language from this jurisdiction: “1”.