Sanction teardown · CA Florida (4th), USA · 2026-03-25
Elilton Alves Gouveia v. Meridian Financial Investments
What happened
In CA Florida (4th), 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 (Case Law)Court identified this citation as non-existent and therefore fabricated.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Real case cited by appellant, but it addresses the indivisible injury rule—unrelated to the contract dispute at issue.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Defendant cited this authority but the citation points to an unrelated Mississippi case about punitive damages; court noted it was far removed from the contract issues here.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Cited authority exists but pertains to procedural/summary-judgment fact issues, not the contract enforcement matters raised here.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Cited case exists but discusses writ of certiorari and site plans/plat applications, unrelated to the settlement-enforcement issues.
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
Warning (and a limerick)
Additional detail
The limerick in question: "There once was a litigant pro se,Who let an AI lead the way.It briefed every claim,Cited cases—by name,That vanished by morning’s next day."
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/1822/Elilton_v._Meridian_USA_25_March_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).