What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Court noted plaintiff's Motion to Compel contained citations to a seemingly nonexistent case referred to as "Hernandez" (pages 6 and 8 of the motion). || Fabricated: Case Law | Court noted plaintiff's Motion for Relief from Order cited a seemingly nonexistent case "United States v. Miller" (page 4 of the motion).

Details

The court identified citations to seemingly nonexistent cases in the plaintiff's filings (e.g., "Hernandez" and "United States v. Miller"), noted prior warnings about AI-generated or unvetted citations, denied the motions, and warned it may recommend dismissal or similar sanctions if the conduct continues.

Sanction teardown · D. Colorado, USA · 2026-01-28

Nonnie Berg v. United Airlines, Inc. (2)

What happened

In D. Colorado, 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)

Court noted plaintiff's Motion to Compel contained citations to a seemingly nonexistent case referred to as "Hernandez" (pages 6 and 8 of the motion).
Fabricated (Case Law)

Court noted plaintiff's Motion for Relief from Order cited a seemingly nonexistent case "United States v. Miller" (page 4 of the motion).

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

Additional detail

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/1421/Berg_v._United_Airlines_USA_28_January_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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