Sanction teardown · W.D. Virginia, USA · 2024-10-10
Iovino v. Michael Stapleton Associates, Ltd.
What happened
In W.D. Virginia, USA, a filing relied on Claude, Westlaw, LexisNexis to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiff cited a case the court and MSA could not locate; the court stated it appears not to exist.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiff cited a case the court and MSA could not locate; the court stated it appears not to exist.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Plaintiff attributed a phrase to a Supreme Court opinion that the court says does not appear in that decision.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Plaintiff misrepresented Menocal as a reported decision at 113 F. Supp. 3d 1125, which the court notes was an earlier, unrelated decision in the same litigation and not the Touhy ruling she relied upon.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Plaintiff attributed a phrase to a Fourth Circuit opinion that the court says does not appear in that decision.
Which AI tool
Claude, Westlaw, LexisNexis. 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
No sanction, but hearing transcript sent to bar authorities
Additional detail
Show cause order is here. Counsel responded to Show Cause order in this document. Show cause hearing transcript is here.
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://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/virginia/vawdce/5:2021cv00064/123582/177/, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).