What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Appellant cited a case the Board could not locate; Board concluded it likely does not exist and excluded it from evidence. || Fabricated: Case Law | Appellant cited a case the Board could not locate; Board concluded it likely does not exist and excluded it from evidence.

Details

The appellant cited two reported decisions which the Board could not locate and concluded likely do not exist and may have been generated with AI; the Board excluded those authorities from evidence and cautioned the appellant about nondisclosure of AI per the Board's Code of Conduct.

Sanction teardown · BC Property Assessment Appeal Board, Canada · 2025-10-02

Backhaus v. Area 01

What happened

In BC Property Assessment Appeal Board, Canada, 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)

Appellant cited a case the Board could not locate; Board concluded it likely does not exist and excluded it from evidence.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Appellant cited a case the Board could not locate; Board concluded it likely does not exist and excluded it from evidence.

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

Additional detail

The appellant cited two reported decisions which the Board could not locate and concluded likely do not exist and may have been generated with AI; the Board excluded those authorities from evidence and cautioned the appellant about nondisclosure of AI per the Board's Code of Conduct.

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/928/Backhaus_v_Area_01_Canada_2_October_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).