Sanction teardown · D. Maine, USA · 2026-05-05
Jessica Fuller v. Hyde School, et al.
What happened
In D. Maine, USA, a filing relied on Claude or ChatGPT to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:
-
Fabricated (Case Law)Court found filings cited several cases for propositions unsupported by the record; some authorities appeared fabricated or could not be located.
-
False Quotes (Case Law)Quoted language in the filings could not be found in the cited sources—Court concluded quotations were absent from the authorities cited.
-
Misrepresented (Case Law)The filings contained inaccurate pincites and incorrect citation details; the Notice of Errata repeated and extended some of these errors.
Which AI tool
Claude or ChatGPT. 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
CLE; Firm procedures and certification; Serve Order to plaintiff; Brief struck
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/2091/USCOURTS-med-2_25-cv-00354-0.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).