Sanction teardown · E.D. Pennsylvania, USA · 2026-06-09
Casey A. Gaddy v. Wood Brothers Bar, Inc., et al.
What happened
In E.D. Pennsylvania, 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:
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Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)Repeated citation to a Baldwin text message that does not exist in the record; Court found the communication fabricated by plaintiff.
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Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)Plaintiff claimed Esser texted that she was 'coming back to close' on disputed nights; Court found no such text in the record and labeled it an invention.
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Misrepresented (Exhibits & Submissions)Plaintiff misattributed a text (quoted as from Gillespie) that was actually sent by Esser; Court corrected the attribution and rejected the plaintiff's inference based on it.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Plaintiff purported to quote Tomasso v. Boeing for language about an inadequately informed decision; Court noted Tomasso contains no such quote and the citation was inaccurate.
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Misrepresented (Exhibits & Submissions)Plaintiff claimed Woody’s president 'explicitly' said video surveillance was available when fired; Court found this was a misrepresentation of the Weiss interview (Weiss said only there was proof of receipts and dispute notifications).
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
Admonishment
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.
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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2399/Gaddy_v._Wood_Brothers_Bar_USA_6_June_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).