What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Legal Norm | Complainant cited a non-existent regulation '28 C.F.R. § 68.18(e)'; the court found the regulation does not exist and treated the citation as fabricated. || False Quotes: Doctrinal Work | Complainant attributed an invented quotation to Chapter 4.2(d) of the OCAHO Practice Manual; the court found the quote appears nowhere in the manual. || Fabricated: Case Law | Complainant relied on a non-existent precedential OCAHO decision and included fabricated quotations; the court identified the decision as fictitious. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Motion for Reconsideration contained five citations the court described as patently fictitious or clear misrepresentations of decisions and/or regulations.

Sanction teardown · OCAHO, USA · 2025-07-29

Damilola Obembe v. Droisys, Inc.

What happened

In OCAHO, 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 (Legal Norm)

Complainant cited a non-existent regulation '28 C.F.R. § 68.18(e)'; the court found the regulation does not exist and treated the citation as fabricated.
False Quotes (Doctrinal Work)

Complainant attributed an invented quotation to Chapter 4.2(d) of the OCAHO Practice Manual; the court found the quote appears nowhere in the manual.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Complainant relied on a non-existent precedential OCAHO decision and included fabricated quotations; the court identified the decision as fictitious.
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Motion for Reconsideration contained five citations the court described as patently fictitious or clear misrepresentations of decisions and/or regulations.

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

Dismissal with prejudice

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/776/Obembe_v._Droisys.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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