Sanction teardown · Corte d'Appello Bologna, Italy · 2026-05-12

Sentenza n. 1352/2026

What happened

In Corte d'Appello Bologna, Italy, 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:

• False Quotes (Case Law)
  Appellant cited 'Cassazione Civile, Sez. I, n. 28913 del 08/11/2018' with a quoted passage; the Court found the decision was by Sezione Lavoro (date 12/11), concerns a different subject, and the quoted incise is not in the text.
• False Quotes (Case Law)
  Appellant cited 'Cassazione Civile, Sez. II, n. 14041 dell'08/07/2016' with a quoted passage; the Court found the cited decision was actually Sezioni Unite on an unrelated topic and the quoted passage does not appear in that decision.

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

Monetary Fine; Bar Referral (monetary penalty: 5000 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/2624/2026-05-12_APPELLO_BOLOGNA.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).