What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Respondent identified a legal citation in the Complainant's rebuttal (pp. 44-46) that could not be found in standard research sources; the Board gave no weight to the citation and ignored it. || Fabricated: Case Law | Respondent challenged a second legal citation in the Complainant's rebuttal as unauthoritative and not locatable; Complainant could not confirm authenticity and the Board excluded it from consideration. || Fabricated: Case Law | Respondent challenged a third legal citation in the Complainant's rebuttal as likely generated by an AI tool and not found in standard sources; the Board refused to rely on it and referred the issue to the General Chair.

Sanction teardown · Calgary ARB, Canada · 2024-11-07

CARB 188903M-2024 (Calgary Assessment Review Board)

What happened

In Calgary ARB, 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)

Respondent identified a legal citation in the Complainant's rebuttal (pp. 44-46) that could not be found in standard research sources; the Board gave no weight to the citation and ignored it.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Respondent challenged a second legal citation in the Complainant's rebuttal as unauthoritative and not locatable; Complainant could not confirm authenticity and the Board excluded it from consideration.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Respondent challenged a third legal citation in the Complainant's rebuttal as likely generated by an AI tool and not found in standard sources; the Board refused to rely on it and referred the issue to the General Chair.

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/1716/CARB-188903M-2024-Re-2024-ABCGYARB-2188903-compressed.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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