Sanction teardown · D. Oregon, USA · 2026-03-23
Stafford v. Andrew Taffet, et al.
What happened
In D. Oregon, 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:
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Campbell v. MERS, 2012 WL 3901716, at *5 (D. Or.)'; the court confirmed no such Oregon federal case exists (only an unrelated Texas state decision and the Oregon docket number corresponded to a different case).
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Tucker v. HSBC, 2014 WL 431965, at *5 (C.D. Cal. 2014)'; the court confirmed no such C.D. Cal. decision exists under that citation.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Galindo v. Financial Freedom, 2020 WL 3619048, at *5 (C.D. Cal. 2020)' (and variants); the court confirmed no such case exists and the provided citation actually corresponds to unrelated union pension litigation in the S.D.N.Y.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'McGinnis v. MERS, No. 6:11-cv-06273-TC (D. Or. Aug. 17, 2011)'; the court confirmed no such Oregon federal case exists with that number or name.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Schweitzer v. FHLMC, No. 3:13-cv-0181, 2013 WL 4279629 (D. Or. Aug. 29, 2013)'; the court confirmed no such Oregon federal case exists and the provided case number corresponded to a Social Security appeal.
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
Not specified in source record.
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/1829/Stafford_v._Taffet_USA_23_March_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).