Sanction teardown · Trib. Mantova, Italy · 2026-03-24

Tribunale di Mantova, Sentenza n. 165/2026

What happened

In Trib. Mantova, 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:

• Misrepresented (Case Law)
  Plaintiff cited Cass. Ordinanza n. 10459/2019 for a proposition the court found absent from that decision; court treats the attribution as incorrect/misattributed.
• Misrepresented (Case Law)
  Plaintiff cited Cass. Ordinanza n. 29106/2017 for a proposition the court found absent from that decision; attribution held to be incorrect.
• Misrepresented (Case Law)
  Plaintiff cited Cass. Sentenza n. 16701/2018 for assertions the court found not present in that ruling; court flagged the misattribution.
• Misrepresented (Case Law)
  Plaintiff cited Cass. Sentenza n. 4897/2016 for propositions the court found absent; court treated the citation as unconcerning and misapplied.
• Misrepresented (Case Law)
  Plaintiff cited Cass. Ordinanza n. 10255/2020 for a point the decision does not contain; court found the attribution incorrect.
• Misrepresented (Case Law)
  Plaintiff cited Cass. Sentenza n. 21297/2016 for a proposition the court found absent; added to the pattern of erroneous attributions.
• Misrepresented (Case Law)
  Plaintiff cited Cass. Ordinanza n. 1999/2015 and Cass. Ordinanza n. 15731/2019 (and others) for content not present in those rulings; court concluded multiple misattributions undermined the brief.

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; Adverse Costs Order (monetary penalty: 4500 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/2616/2026-03-24_TRIBUNALE_MANTOVA.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).