What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Briefs contained several citations to completely fabricated cases that could not be located in any Oregon law reporter or database; court found them nonexistent and declined to consider them. || False Quotes: Case Law | Briefs included multiple purported quotations the court could not find in the cited Oregon cases or elsewhere in Oregon law; quotations were determined to be inaccurate or nonexistent. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Claims cited cases that were unrelated to the propositions for which they were cited, i.e., inaccurately applied or misrepresented precedents.

Sanction teardown · CA Oregon, USA · 2026-02-11

Keith Powell v. Employment Dep. & First Congregational Church of Portland

What happened

In CA Oregon, 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)

Briefs contained several citations to completely fabricated cases that could not be located in any Oregon law reporter or database; court found them nonexistent and declined to consider them.
False Quotes (Case Law)

Briefs included multiple purported quotations the court could not find in the cited Oregon cases or elsewhere in Oregon law; quotations were determined to be inaccurate or nonexistent.
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Claims cited cases that were unrelated to the propositions for which they were cited, i.e., inaccurately applied or misrepresented precedents.

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 (monetary penalty: 500 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/1493/Keith_POWELL_Petitioner_v_EMPLOYMENT_DEPARTMENT_and_First_Congregational_C.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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