What was hallucinated

Misrepresented: Case Law | Plaintiff cited Meier ex rel. Meier to argue FSIA does not bar jurisdictional discovery; Court observed Meier concerns personal jurisdiction and does not reference FSIA, immunity, or discovery stays. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Plaintiff relied on In re Clerici as support for jurisdictional discovery/FSIA-related propositions; Court noted In re Clerici addresses 28 U.S.C. § 1782 and does not discuss FSIA, immunity, or stays of discovery. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Plaintiff cited McCarthy v. Barnett Bank of Polk Cnty. as establishing the standard for staying discovery; Court explained McCarthy concerns media intervention/confidentiality and does not address motions to stay discovery.

Sanction teardown · S.D. Florida, USA · 2026-04-08

Joseph C. Zoghaib v. Societe Generale De Banque Au Liban, et al.

What happened

In S.D. Florida, 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:

Misrepresented (Case Law)

Plaintiff cited Meier ex rel. Meier to argue FSIA does not bar jurisdictional discovery; Court observed Meier concerns personal jurisdiction and does not reference FSIA, immunity, or discovery stays.
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Plaintiff relied on In re Clerici as support for jurisdictional discovery/FSIA-related propositions; Court noted In re Clerici addresses 28 U.S.C. § 1782 and does not discuss FSIA, immunity, or stays of discovery.
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Plaintiff cited McCarthy v. Barnett Bank of Polk Cnty. as establishing the standard for staying discovery; Court explained McCarthy concerns media intervention/confidentiality and does not address motions to stay discovery.

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

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/1967/Zoghaib_v._Bank_Liban_USA_8_April_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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