Sanction teardown · TR Guimarães, Portugal · 2026-02-10
Processo nº 986/23.7GAFAF.G1
What happened
In TR Guimarães, Portugal, 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)Recorrente identificou e transcreveu excertos de um acórdão de Tribunal Superior que o Tribunal apurou não existir.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Recorrente citou outro acórdão supostamente de Tribunal das Relações/Supremo que não consta nas fontes indicadas.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Transcrição de excerto atribuída a acórdão superior que o Tribunal verificou ser inexistente no sistema Citius.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Apresentação de acórdão supostamente publicado em fonte indicada pelo recorrente, mas não localizado em qualquer fonte.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Citação de acórdão com número que nunca correu termos no Tribunal da Relação de Guimarães, apurada como inexistente.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Sexto acórdão alegado e transcrito pelo recorrente igualmente não encontrado nas bases ou no sistema Citius.
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
Adverse Costs Order; Bar Referral (monetary penalty: 1 EUR.)
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/2170/Tribunal_da_Rela%C3%A7%C3%A3o_de_Guimar%C3%A3es_-_986_23.7GAFAF.G1.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).