Skip to main content
Citation Safe

Was Gonzalez on the other side of your case?

Check their next brief before they file — Opposition Check verifies every citation in a filed brief for $49, no signup. Get Opposition Check →

Gonzalez v. Texas Taxpayers and Research Association

Court
W.D. Texas
Jurisdiction
USA
Decided
2025-01-29
AI tool
Lexis Nexis's AI
Outcome
Plaintiff's response was stricken and monetary sanctions were imposed.
Monetary penalty
3961 USD

What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Cited a non-existent D.C. Circuit decision; court found it does not exist. || Fabricated: Case Law | Cited a non-existent S.D. Tex. case; court found it does not exist. || Fabricated: Case Law | Cited a non-existent S.D. Tex. case; court found it does not exist. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Miscited and misrepresented holding; claimed denial of MTD based on numerosity, but the located Cruz v. Aramark case is in a different reporter/court/year and does not address numerosity. || Fabricated: Case Law | Cited a non-existent case title; the volume/page cited correspond to Ogden v. Gibraltar Savings Association (wrongful foreclosure), not the defamation proposition stated.

Details

In the case of Gonzalez v. Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, the court found that Plaintiff's counsel, John L. Pittman III, included fabricated citations, miscited cases, and misrepresented legal propositions in his response to a motion to dismiss. Pittman initially denied using AI but later admitted to using Lexis Nexis's AI citation generator. The court granted the defendant's motion to strike the plaintiff's response and imposed monetary sanctions on Pittman, requiring him to pay $3,852.50 in attorney's fees and $108.54 in costs to the defendant. The court deemed this an appropriate exercise of its inherent power due to the abundance of technical and substantive errors in the brief, which inhibited the defendant's ability to efficiently respond.

Sanction teardown · W.D. Texas, USA · 2025-01-29

Gonzalez v. Texas Taxpayers and Research Association

What happened

In W.D. Texas, USA, a filing relied on Lexis Nexis's AI to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Cited a non-existent D.C. Circuit decision; court found it does not exist.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Cited a non-existent S.D. Tex. case; court found it does not exist.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Cited a non-existent S.D. Tex. case; court found it does not exist.
  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    Miscited and misrepresented holding; claimed denial of MTD based on numerosity, but the located Cruz v. Aramark case is in a different reporter/court/year and does not address numerosity.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Cited a non-existent case title; the volume/page cited correspond to Ogden v. Gibraltar Savings Association (wrongful foreclosure), not the defamation proposition stated.

Which AI tool

Lexis Nexis's AI. 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

Plaintiff's response was stricken and monetary sanctions were imposed. (monetary penalty: 3961 USD.)

Additional detail

In the case of Gonzalez v. Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, the court found that Plaintiff's counsel, John L. Pittman III, included fabricated citations, miscited cases, and misrepresented legal propositions in his response to a motion to dismiss. Pittman initially denied using AI but later admitted to using Lexis Nexis's AI citation generator. The court granted the defendant's motion to strike the plaintiff's response and imposed monetary sanctions on Pittman, requiring him to pay $3,852.50 in attorney's fees and $108.54 in costs to the defendant. The court deemed this an appropriate exercise of its inherent power due to the abundance of technical and substantive errors in the brief, which inhibited the defendant's ability to efficiently respond.

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/576/Gonzalez_v._Texas_Taxpayers_and_Research_Association_USA_29_January_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/576/Gonzalez_v._Texas_Taxpayers_and_Research_Association_USA_29_January_2025.pdf

Don’t be the next case in this database.

Citation Safe checks every citation against primary sources before it reaches a filing.

Try the free checkerBack to database

On the opposing side of their next motion?

Check their next brief through the same engine that would have caught this filing — $49, no signup, full annotated report you can attach to your Rule 11 or sanctions motion.

Open Opposition Check — $49Sanctions-motion template