Sanction teardown · S.D. Indiana, USA · 2026-01-15
North Atlantic Operating Company, Inc., et al. v. Indiana Import, LLC, et al.
What happened
In S.D. Indiana, 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:
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Fabricated (Case Law)Defense counsel cited a non-existent case to argue duplicative litigation; the Court found the case did not exist and struck/ordered correction.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Defense counsel cited a second non-existent case in support of the same argument; the Court found it did not exist and required docket sheets to be filed, after which defendants identified different actual cases.
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; Order to retain local counsel
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/1357/NAOC_v._Indiana_Imports_USA_15_January_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).