What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Appellee's brief cited a nonexistent case, 'Cade v. Roberts, 403 So. 2d 516 (Fla. 5th DCA 1981)'; court found no reported case by that name and that the cited reporter page pertained to an unrelated opinion (Girardeau v. State). || Misrepresented: Case Law | Two other Southern Reporter cases cited in the answer brief were misquoted—the brief attributed quoted text to the wrong cases (quotations found in different opinions than those cited).

Details

"Unfortunately, we're finding this problem arising more and more frequently […] When a lawyer cites imaginary legal authorities to our court as if they were law, we are compelled to refer that lawyer to the Bar because of the professional rules of conduct. It doesn't take much moral imagination to understand why. As judges, we rely on attorneys to ethically represent their clients. We expect that representation to be zealous, honest, and competent. Indeed, lawyers owe the courts and their clients a duty to practice with competence and candor. By signing an appellate brief, a lawyer certifies that he or she has read the document and that to the best of the lawyer's knowledge, information, and belief there are "good grounds to support the document."These ethical requirements are not excused simply because a computer program generated a faulty or misleading legal analysis. Nor is it an excuse that the attorney did not intend to mislead the court. "To state the obvious, it is a fundamental duty of attorneys to read the legal authorities they cite in appellate briefs or any other court filings to determine that the authorities stand for the propositions for which they are cited."Obviously, that didn't happen when Ms. McLane filed this answer brief. Instead, counsel "fundamentally abdicated" her duty to the court and her client when she submitted this filing without verifying that the three cases cited in her brief said what she claimed they said. Accordingly, it is our duty to refer this matter to the Florida Bar to proceed as it deems appropriate."

Sanction teardown · CA Florida, USA · 2025-12-10

Russell v. Mells

What happened

In CA Florida, 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:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Appellee's brief cited a nonexistent case, 'Cade v. Roberts, 403 So. 2d 516 (Fla. 5th DCA 1981)'; court found no reported case by that name and that the cited reporter page pertained to an unrelated opinion (Girardeau v. State).
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Two other Southern Reporter cases cited in the answer brief were misquoted—the brief attributed quoted text to the wrong cases (quotations found in different opinions than those cited).

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

Bar Referral

Additional detail

"Unfortunately, we're finding this problem arising more and more frequently […] When a lawyer cites imaginary legal authorities to our court as if they were law, we are compelled to refer that lawyer to the Bar because of the professional rules of conduct. It doesn't take much moral imagination to understand why. As judges, we rely on attorneys to ethically represent their clients. We expect that representation to be zealous, honest, and competent. Indeed, lawyers owe the courts and their clients a duty to practice with competence and candor. By signing an appellate brief, a lawyer certifies that he or she has read the document and that to the best of the lawyer's knowledge, information, and belief there are "good grounds to support the document."These ethical requirements are not excused simply because a computer program generated a faulty or misleading legal analysis. Nor is it an excuse that the attorney did not intend to mislead the court. "To state the obvious, it is a fundamental duty of attorneys to read the legal authorities they cite in appellate briefs or any other court filings to determine that the authorities stand for the propositions for which they are cited."Obviously, that didn't happen when Ms. McLane filed this answer brief. Instead, counsel "fundamentally abdicated" her duty to the court and her client when she submitted this filing without verifying that the three cases cited in her brief said what she claimed they said. Accordingly, it is our duty to refer this matter to the Florida Bar to proceed as it deems appropriate."

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://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/11/self-represented-plaintiff-files-lawsuit-court-spots-ai-hallucinated-citations-in-defense-lawyers-filings/, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).