Sanction teardown · Queensland IRC, Australia · 2026-04-29
Ellul v State of Queensland
What happened
In Queensland IRC, Australia, 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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Misrepresented (Case Law)Appellant cited 'Keegan v Sussan Corporation (Aust.) Pty Ltd [2014] QIRC 193', which the Commission could not locate and identified as a misattribution (the citation corresponds to Morton v State of Queensland [2014] QIRC 193); court inferred likely AI use and found the authority irrelevant to the extension issue.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Appellant cited 'Robinson v State of Queensland [2015] QIRC 165', which the Commission identified as incorrect and belonging to a different matter (corresponding to Hegarty v Townsville City Council [2015] QIRC 165); court inferred AI involvement and disregarded the citation for the extension application.
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
Not specified in source record.
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/2567/Ellul_v_State_of_Queensland_2026_QIRC_147_29_April_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).