What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Most footnoted anthropological/historical sources in the Applicant’s Summary did not exist; FNLRS described the citations as fabricated and the Court accepted they likely arose from AI hallucination.

Details

"14 Here, the applicant's solicitor’s use of AI in the preparation of two court documents has given rise to cost, inconvenience and delay to the parties and has compromised the effectiveness of the administration of justice. But I do not consider the use of AI in this case means that it is appropriate to refer the solicitors’ conduct to the Victorian Legal Services Board. Here an inexperienced junior solicitor was given the task of preparing document citations for an amended pleading, and did so while working remotely and without access to the documents to be cited. In attempting to cite the relevant documents she used an (apparently AI-assisted) research tool which she considered had produced accurate citations when she previously used it. And as soon as Massar Briggs Law was told of the false citations the problem was addressed. The junior solicitor and the principal solicitor have apologised or expressed their regret to the other parties and the Court, and there was no suggestion that they were not genuine in doing so.15 The junior solicitor took insufficient care in using Googe Scholar as the source of document citations in court documents, and in failing to check the citations against the physical and electronic copies of the cited documents that were held at Massar Briggs Law’s office. The error was centrally one of failing to check and verify the output of the search tool, which was contributed to by the inexperience of the junior solicitor and the failure of Mr Briggs to have systems in place to ensure that her work was appropriately supervised and checked. To censure those errors it is sufficient that these reasons be published."

Sanction teardown · Federal Court, Australia · 2025-07-02

Murray v. State of Victoria

What happened

In Federal Court, Australia, a filing relied on Google Scholar (allegedly) to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Most footnoted anthropological/historical sources in the Applicant’s Summary did not exist; FNLRS described the citations as fabricated and the Court accepted they likely arose from AI hallucination.

Which AI tool

Google Scholar (allegedly). 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

Order of costs to other party; no professional referral (monetary penalty: 1 AUD.)

Additional detail

"14 Here, the applicant's solicitor’s use of AI in the preparation of two court documents has given rise to cost, inconvenience and delay to the parties and has compromised the effectiveness of the administration of justice. But I do not consider the use of AI in this case means that it is appropriate to refer the solicitors’ conduct to the Victorian Legal Services Board. Here an inexperienced junior solicitor was given the task of preparing document citations for an amended pleading, and did so while working remotely and without access to the documents to be cited. In attempting to cite the relevant documents she used an (apparently AI-assisted) research tool which she considered had produced accurate citations when she previously used it. And as soon as Massar Briggs Law was told of the false citations the problem was addressed. The junior solicitor and the principal solicitor have apologised or expressed their regret to the other parties and the Court, and there was no suggestion that they were not genuine in doing so.15 The junior solicitor took insufficient care in using Googe Scholar as the source of document citations in court documents, and in failing to check the citations against the physical and electronic copies of the cited documents that were held at Massar Briggs Law’s office. The error was centrally one of failing to check and verify the output of the search tool, which was contributed to by the inexperience of the junior solicitor and the failure of Mr Briggs to have systems in place to ensure that her work was appropriately supervised and checked. To censure those errors it is sufficient that these reasons be published."

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.

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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/533/Murray_v._Victoria_2_July_2025_Australia.docx, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).