Sanction teardown · CA California, USA · 2026-08-19
In re the Marriage of Kira Lindsay and Jamie Alexander Dillon
What happened
In CA 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:
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False Quotes (Case Law)Respondent attributed a nonexistent quotation/legal proposition to Wilkison (101 Cal.App.4th 822); court found the attribution inaccurate and disregarded the argument relying on it.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Respondent attributed a nonexistent quotation/legal proposition to Brown v. Grimes (192 Cal.App.4th 265); court found the attribution inaccurate and disregarded the argument relying on it.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Respondent attributed a nonexistent quotation/legal proposition to In re Marriage of Iberti (55 Cal.App.4th 1434); court found the attribution inaccurate and disregarded the argument relying on it.
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
Costs Denied
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/2917/Marriage_of_Dillon_USA_18_AUgust_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).