Sanction teardown · Supreme Court of Tasmania, Australia · 2024-07-12
Lakaev v McConkey
What happened
In Supreme Court of Tasmania, Australia, 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)Appellant mischaracterized De L v Director-General as a case about false testimony leading to reversal; the Court clarified it concerned international child abduction and not false evidence.
-
Fabricated (Case Law)Appellant cited a non-existent case 'Hewitt v Omari [2015] NSWCA 175'; the Court found no such case and noted the citation corresponds to the unrelated Palermo Seafood Pty Ltd v Lunapas [2015] NSWCA 175.
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
Appeal dismissed for want of prosecution
Additional detail
The appellant's submissions included a misleading reference to a High Court case, De L v Director-General, NSW Department of Community Services, misrepresenting its relevance to false testimony, which was not the case's subject matter, and a fabricated reference to Hewitt v Omari [2015] NSWCA 175, which does not exist. The appeal was dismissed, considering the lack of progress and potential prejudice to the respondent.
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/552/Lakaev_v_McConkey_Australia_12_July_2024.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).