Sanction teardown · Cal. Ct. App., 4th App. Dist., Div. 2, USA · 2026-08-27
Varma v. The Bank of New York Mellon
What happened
In Cal. Ct. App., 4th App. Dist., Div. 2, 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)Opening brief cited a case that the court found appears not to exist.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening brief cited a case that the court found appears not to exist.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening brief cited a case that the court found appears not to exist.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening brief cited a case that the court found appears not to exist.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Quotation attributed to Romero does not appear in that decision, per the court.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Quotation attributed to U.S. v. Tweel does not appear in that decision, per the court.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Quotation attributed to Strong v. County of Santa Cruz does not appear in that decision, per the court.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Appellants cited Edelstein for propositions the court found the case does not support.
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
Sanctions imposed: appellants sanctioned to pay Bank of New York's appellate attorney fees (amount to be determined by the trial court); matter remanded to determine fee award; court forwarded opinion to State Bar for possible investigation.
Additional detail
The appellants' opening brief contained numerous citations to non-existent cases, quotations that do not appear in the authorities cited, and propositions unsupported by cited cases—hallmarks the court attributed to generative AI. The court issued an order to show cause, found the appellants failed to show cause, and sanctioned them for unreasonable violation of appellate briefing rules by ordering payment of the respondent's appellate attorney fees (amount to be set by the trial court). The court emphasized that pro se litigants remain responsible for verifying authorities and referred the matter to the State Bar to investigate potential unauthorized practice.
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.
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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2994/Varma_v._BNYM_USA_August_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).