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Re Nicholson

Court
Ontario SCJ
Jurisdiction
Canada
Decided
2025-02-18
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Costs awarded against Bankrupt
Monetary penalty
7267

What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Bankrupt cited 'Kenwood Hills Inc., 2015 ONSC 4481' in his submissions; court could not locate any such decision and treated it as a fictitious authority possibly generated by AI. || Fabricated: Case Law | Bankrupt relied on 'Portus Alternative Asset Management Inc., 2007 ONSC 5089'; court could not find this citation on CanLII and flagged it as apparently non-existent. || Fabricated: Case Law | Bankrupt cited 'Patterson v. Kingsway Financial Services Inc., 2006 ONCA 384' but the court could not locate that citation and treated it as non-existent in the form presented. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Bankrupt cited a 2019 ONSC decision as 'Toronto-Dominion Bank v. Canmarc Holdings Inc., 2019 ONSC 3451'; the court found the 2019 ONSC 3451 citation corresponds to a different case (Montour v. Ontario) and noted the Bankrupt had mis-cited / misrepresented the precedent.

Sanction teardown · Ontario SCJ, Canada · 2025-02-18

Re Nicholson

What happened

In Ontario SCJ, Canada, 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)
    Bankrupt cited 'Kenwood Hills Inc., 2015 ONSC 4481' in his submissions; court could not locate any such decision and treated it as a fictitious authority possibly generated by AI.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Bankrupt relied on 'Portus Alternative Asset Management Inc., 2007 ONSC 5089'; court could not find this citation on CanLII and flagged it as apparently non-existent.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Bankrupt cited 'Patterson v. Kingsway Financial Services Inc., 2006 ONCA 384' but the court could not locate that citation and treated it as non-existent in the form presented.
  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    Bankrupt cited a 2019 ONSC decision as 'Toronto-Dominion Bank v. Canmarc Holdings Inc., 2019 ONSC 3451'; the court found the 2019 ONSC 3451 citation corresponds to a different case (Montour v. Ontario) and noted the Bankrupt had mis-cited / misrepresented the precedent.

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

Costs awarded against Bankrupt (monetary penalty: 7267 .)

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/1717/Re-Nicholson-2025-ONSC-1069-compressed.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/1717/Re-Nicholson-2025-ONSC-1069-compressed.pdf

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