Sanction teardown · CA California (4d), USA · 2026-07-10

Del Biaggio v. Bansen

What happened

In CA California (4d), 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)
  Brief misidentified and misstated Guinn (cited as 'Guinn v. Dotco, Inc., 27 Cal.App.4th 262') and described it as involving a contractual fee provision when it concerned statutory authority.
• False Quotes (Case Law)
  Opening brief attributed a definitive statement endorsing paralegal fee recovery to Gorman that does not appear in the opinion.
• False Quotes (Case Law)
  Opening brief purported to quote PLCM with two specific passages endorsing paralegal fee recovery; court found no such language in PLCM and that PLCM did not address paralegal fees.

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

Monetary Sanction (monetary penalty: 1500 USD.)

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/2595/Del_Baggio_v._Bansen_USA_10_July_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).