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Pettit v. Allina Health System

Court
D. Minnesotta
Jurisdiction
USA
Decided
2025-01-30
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Monetary Sanction
Monetary penalty
10000 USD

What was hallucinated

Misrepresented: Case Law | Attorney cited a probate decision as supporting that awarding full attorneys' fees as a sanction is improper; the Court found the cited decision says nothing about Rule 11 or sanctions. || Misrepresented: Exhibits & Submissions | Large portions of another plaintiff's complaint (Fielding) were copied verbatim and presented as Ms. Pettit's own factual allegations, including charged allegations that she later testified were not her experiences.

Sanction teardown · D. Minnesotta, USA · 2025-01-30

Pettit v. Allina Health System

What happened

In D. Minnesotta, 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:

  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    Attorney cited a probate decision as supporting that awarding full attorneys' fees as a sanction is improper; the Court found the cited decision says nothing about Rule 11 or sanctions.
  • Misrepresented (Exhibits & Submissions)
    Large portions of another plaintiff's complaint (Fielding) were copied verbatim and presented as Ms. Pettit's own factual allegations, including charged allegations that she later testified were not her experiences.

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: 10000 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.

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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2103/Pettit_v_Allina_Health_System_USA_30_January_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2103/Pettit_v_Allina_Health_System_USA_30_January_2025.pdf

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