Sanction teardown · SC California, USA · 2025-08-06

Gezalayan v. BMW North American, LLC

What happened

In SC California, 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:

• Fabricated (Case Law)
  Plaintiff's opposition cited a non-existent case as sole authority for the Constructive Payment Doctrine; court ordered explanation and admonished counsel.

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 ordered plaintiff's counsel to explain the citation, admonished counsel, and warned that future reference to non-existent authority may result in sanctions.

Additional detail

The court identified a non-existent case cited in plaintiff's brief—"Steele v. Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc., 10 Cal. App. 5th Supp. 1, 10 (2016)"—noting an editor's comment that unverified citations likely generated by AI were preserved in the record. On the court's own motion it ordered plaintiff's counsel to explain the citation, admonished counsel to refrain from citing non-existent authority, and warned that sanctions could follow for future violations.

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/2356/29_-_Gezalayan_v_BMW_North_American_LLC.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).