Sanction teardown · Gelderland, Netherlands · 2025-11-06
ECLI:NL:RBGEL:2025:9423
What happened
In Gelderland, Netherlands, 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 (Case Law)Plaintiff's counsel cited several CRvB rulings with ECLI numbers that the court could not locate; some cited statements appear not to exist and were therefore rejected.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)ECLI numbers that the court located corresponded to topics irrelevant to the Participation Act argument; the cited case law was misrepresented and not relevant.
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
Court found several cited rulings non-existent or irrelevant, rejected reliance on that case law, and dismissed the appeal.
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/1081/ECLI_NL_RBGEL_2025_9423_Gelderland_District_Court_ARN_24_8975.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).