What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Appellant cited three Board/BC Court decisions to support a 20% downward adjustment; the Assessor's search found no such decisions and the Board concluded the cited decisions do not exist. || Fabricated: Case Law | Appellant cited two BC Court decisions in support of a 'Demolition and Restoration Method (DRM)'; the Assessor could not locate these cases and the Board found they do not exist. || Misrepresented: Doctrinal Work | Appellant relied on an International Valuation Standards reference ('IVS 104-3') for valuation of disaster-affected land; the Assessor reported the IVS document cited does not support that method and the Board treated the citation as incorrect/misrepresented.

Details

(Monetary sanction decided in later determination, available here.)

Sanction teardown · BCPAAB, Canada · 2025-10-07

Ren v. Area 09

What happened

In BCPAAB, 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)

Appellant cited three Board/BC Court decisions to support a 20% downward adjustment; the Assessor's search found no such decisions and the Board concluded the cited decisions do not exist.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Appellant cited two BC Court decisions in support of a 'Demolition and Restoration Method (DRM)'; the Assessor could not locate these cases and the Board found they do not exist.
Misrepresented (Doctrinal Work)

Appellant relied on an International Valuation Standards reference ('IVS 104-3') for valuation of disaster-affected land; the Assessor reported the IVS document cited does not support that method and the Board treated the citation as incorrect/misrepresented.

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

Breach of Board's Code of Conduct (monetary penalty: 910 CAD.)

Additional detail

(Monetary sanction decided in later determination, available here.)

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/870/Ren_v_Area_Canada.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).