Sanction teardown · Family Court, Australia · 2026-07-01

Ba v Sterling Parts Australia Pty Ltd

What happened

In Family Court, Australia, 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 (Exhibits & Submissions)
  EV-001 listed as 'Signed Service Agreement' but not produced; relied on in pleading as central contractual evidence and inferred by court to be AI‑generated/fabricated.
• Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)
  EV-016 listed as 'Dispatch System Screenshot' claimed but screenshots/photographs were not provided; court treated entry as unsupported and likely AI‑generated.
• Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)
  EV-023 and EV-023a listed as 'Dispatch System Manual' and 'App Mandate Notice' respectively but were not produced; relied on to establish systemic dependency and technological control and inferred to be fabricated.
• Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)
  EV-036 listed as 'Earnings & Cost Summary Table' (key to economic dependence claim) but not produced; court inferred the item was generated by AI and not authentic.
• Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)
  EV-014 listed as 'Vehicle & Operating Cost Policy' but not produced; used to prove applicant bore operating costs; court inferred likely fabricated.

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/2545/Ba_v_Sterling_Parts_Australia_Pty_Ltd_2026_FedCFamC2G_1245_1_July_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).