What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Plaintiff's counsel cited non-existent case law in the 6.5.2025 reply; the court could not locate the citations and counsel admitted on 7.5.2025 they were invented due to a mistakenly filed draft.

Details

AI UseCounsel explained that the hallucinated citations were included in a draft intended for personal legal research and learning, which was mistakenly filed with the court. This constituted an implicit admission that generative AI tools were involved.Ruling/SanctionWhile Judge Itay Katz did not impose personal costs, he referred the matter to the Legal Department of the Judicial Authority to determine whether further steps—including referral to the Israel Bar Association Ethics Committee—should be taken. The court emphasized this was done as a gesture of leniency with the hope that such behavior will not recur.Key Judicial ReasoningThe court referred to several other recent Israeli cases to underscore the growing recognition of AI hallucination risk in legal practice. It reiterated the requirement for attorneys to meticulously verify any citation before submission and warned that future similar instances may not receive such lenient treatment.

Sanction teardown · Israel, Israel · 2025-05-12

Case No. 72079-11-24

What happened

In Israel, Israel, 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)

Plaintiff's counsel cited non-existent case law in the 6.5.2025 reply; the court could not locate the citations and counsel admitted on 7.5.2025 they were invented due to a mistakenly filed draft.

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

No immediate sanction imposed; the matter was referred to the Legal Department of the Court Administration for review and potential action, including referral to the Ethics Committee of the Israel Bar Association

Additional detail

AI UseCounsel explained that the hallucinated citations were included in a draft intended for personal legal research and learning, which was mistakenly filed with the court. This constituted an implicit admission that generative AI tools were involved.Ruling/SanctionWhile Judge Itay Katz did not impose personal costs, he referred the matter to the Legal Department of the Judicial Authority to determine whether further steps—including referral to the Israel Bar Association Ethics Committee—should be taken. The court emphasized this was done as a gesture of leniency with the hope that such behavior will not recur.Key Judicial ReasoningThe court referred to several other recent Israeli cases to underscore the growing recognition of AI hallucination risk in legal practice. It reiterated the requirement for attorneys to meticulously verify any citation before submission and warned that future similar instances may not receive such lenient treatment.

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/363/X_v._Y_Israel_May_12_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).