Sanction teardown · DC Oklahoma, USA · 2026-05-21
In re the Marriage of Amy Haddock and Justin Blu Haddock
What happened
In DC Oklahoma, 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)Motion contained three citations to nonexistent law; court found citations were fabricated/nonexistent and flagged them as errant.
-
Misrepresented (Case Law)Motion contained three cases with inaccurate descriptions of the legal propositions they supposedly stood for; court found the case descriptions were incorrect/misrepresented.
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
Monetary Sanction; Bar Referral; Mandatory Audit of Firm Knowledge base; Adverse Costs Order (monetary penalty: 2000 USD.)
Additional detail
Costs later found to amount to 20,752 USD.
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/2226/26.05.21._Haddock._Order.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).