What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Plaintiffs cited a non-existent case 'Wood v. City of Utica' to support a legal proposition; the Court found no such case at the cited reporter and concluded the citation was fabricated. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Plaintiffs cited 'Qutb v. Ramsey' with an incorrect reporter and circuit; the Court found the citation misrepresented the case (actual reference was not the cited 5th Cir. F. App'x citation). || False Quotes: Case Law | Plaintiffs included invented quotations and inaccurate summaries attributed to various authorities that the Court could not locate in the cited sources.

Details

Show Cause Order is here.

Sanction teardown · E.D. Louisiana, USA · 2026-03-05

Woodward Harbor L.L.C., et al. v. City of Mandeville

What happened

In E.D. Louisiana, 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:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Plaintiffs cited a non-existent case 'Wood v. City of Utica' to support a legal proposition; the Court found no such case at the cited reporter and concluded the citation was fabricated.
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Plaintiffs cited 'Qutb v. Ramsey' with an incorrect reporter and circuit; the Court found the citation misrepresented the case (actual reference was not the cited 5th Cir. F. App'x citation).
False Quotes (Case Law)

Plaintiffs included invented quotations and inaccurate summaries attributed to various authorities that the Court could not locate in the cited sources.

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 Sanction; CLE (monetary penalty: 1000 USD.)

Additional detail

Show Cause Order is here.

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/1600/Woodward_Harbor_LLC_et_al_v_City_of_Mandeville_et_al__laedce-23-05824__0117.0.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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