Sanction teardown · SC Connecticut, USA · 2026-03-27
Plaintiff v. Defendant
What happened
In SC Connecticut, 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)Defendant cited 'Douchette v. Doucette, 50 Conn. App. 541, 544-45 (1998)' for the proposition that property distributions may be modified; court found the reporter citation corresponds to a different opinion (Glass v. Peter Mitchell Construction Leasing and Development Corporation, 50 Conn. App. 539 (1998)) and concluded the citation is an AI-generated hallucination.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Multiple other fictitious or inapplicable cases and legal propositions in the defendant's motion (notably pages 2–3); court found most cited cases do not support the asserted propositions or do not exist.
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
DOCKET NO. FST-FA21-6050273-S
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: Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).