Sanction teardown · California SC, USA · 2025-03-10
Evans v. Execushield, Inc.
What happened
In California SC, 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:
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False Quotes (Case Law)Reply brief attributed the quotation "courts are not obligated to deny certification where the complaint omits facts that would support class treatment" to Sav-On Drug Stores; Court's Westlaw search found no such language in Sav-On.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Reply brief attributed the proposition that a court may "constructively" add new claims to a complaint for certification to Ghazaryan; Court found the quoted language and asserted holding did not exist in Ghazaryan.
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
Order to Notify Client; No fee available for Counsel in this case
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.
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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2362/35_-_Evans_v_Execushield_Inc.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).