What was hallucinated

Misrepresented: Case Law | Plaintiffs cited Stanley v. University of Southern California for the proposition that service-of-process fees are taxable under 28 U.S.C. § 1920(1); court found the citation does not support that proposition. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Plaintiffs cited Shum v. Intel Corp. as Ninth Circuit authority that pro se litigants may recover reasonable costs; court noted Shum is a Federal Circuit case and does not say what plaintiffs claim. || Fabricated: Case Law | Plaintiffs cited a Boilermaker v. Skelly decision with a 2013 WL citation; court found no such cited decision exists and that the actual Boilermaker opinion (389 F. Supp. 2d 1222) does not say what plaintiffs claimed.

Sanction teardown · D. Nevada, USA · 2026-04-06

Wendy Wolkenstein and Rebecca Knepp v. Dan Heinrich and Samual Tillery

What happened

In D. Nevada, 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:

Misrepresented (Case Law)

Plaintiffs cited Stanley v. University of Southern California for the proposition that service-of-process fees are taxable under 28 U.S.C. § 1920(1); court found the citation does not support that proposition.
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Plaintiffs cited Shum v. Intel Corp. as Ninth Circuit authority that pro se litigants may recover reasonable costs; court noted Shum is a Federal Circuit case and does not say what plaintiffs claim.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Plaintiffs cited a Boilermaker v. Skelly decision with a 2013 WL citation; court found no such cited decision exists and that the actual Boilermaker opinion (389 F. Supp. 2d 1222) does not say what plaintiffs claimed.

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

Warning

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/1940/Wolkenstein_et_al_v_Heinrich_et_al_USA_6_APril_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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