What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Appellant's Notice of Appeal and Summary of Argument contained multiple case citations that the Court could not locate and concluded were fictitious; the Court recorded the citations could not be found and were not authoritative.

Details

The appellant admitted using generative AI to prepare his Notice of Appeal and Summary of Argument. The Court found several cited authorities could not be located (concluding they were fictitious) and held that deploying unverified AI-generated research that cites non-existent cases breaches duties not to mislead the court and risks contravening Pt XIVB of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) (on confidentiality of proceedings).

Sanction teardown · Family Court, Australia · 2025-09-12

Helmold & Mariya (No 2)

What happened

In Family Court, 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:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Appellant's Notice of Appeal and Summary of Argument contained multiple case citations that the Court could not locate and concluded were fictitious; the Court recorded the citations could not be found and were not authoritative.

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

Additional detail

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.

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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/817/Helmold__Mariya_No_2_2025_FedCFamC1A_163_12_September_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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