What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Applicant’s counsel cited several non-existent cases in the written submissions (offending factum); the Court issued four directions before counsel admitted AI use caused the error.

Details

In the original order, the court held:"[38] Applicants’ counsel provided further correspondence advising, for the first time, of his reliance on Visto.ai described as a professional legal research platform designed specifically for Canadian immigration and refugee law practitioners. He also indicated that he did not independently verify the citations as they were understood to reflect well established and widely accepted principles of law. In other words, the undeclared and unverified artificial intelligence had no impact, and the substantive legal argument was unaffected and supported by other cases.[39] I do not accept that this is permissible. The use of generative artificial intelligence is increasingly common and a perfectly valid tool for counsel to use; however, in this Court, its use must be declared and as a matter of both practice, good sense and professionalism, its output must be verified by a human. The Court cannot be expected to spend time hunting for cases which do not exist or considering erroneous propositions of law.[40] In fact, the two case hallucinations were not the full extent of the failure of the artificial intelligence product used. It also hallucinated the proper test for the admission on judicial review of evidence not before the decision-maker and cited, as authority, a case which had no bearing on the issue at all. To be clear, this was not a situation of a stray case with a variation of the established test but, rather, an approach similar to the test for new evidence on appeal. As noted above, the case relied upon in support of the wrong test (Cepeda-Gutierrez) has nothing to do with the issue. I note in passing that the case comprises 29 paragraphs and would take only a few minutes to review.[41] In addition, counsel’s reliance on artificial intelligence was not revealed until after the issuance of four Directions. I find that this amounts to an attempt to mislead the Court and to conceal the reliance by describing the hallucinated authorities as “mis-cited” Had the initial request for a Book of Authorities resulted in the explanation in the last letter, I may have been more sympathetic. As matters stand, I am concerned that counsel does not recognize the seriousness of the issue."In the final order, the court added:"While the use of generative AI is not the responsibility of the responding party, it was not appropriate for the Respondent to not make any response to the Court’s four directions and Order. Indeed, assuming that the Respondent noticed the hallucinated cases on receipt of the written argument, it should have brought this to the attention of the Court.[...]Given that Applicant’s counsel was not remunerated for his services in the file, which included the motion on which the offending factum was filed and a motion for a stay of removal and, in addition, that I am also of the view that the Respondent’s lack of action exacerbated matters and it should not benefit as a result, I am ordering a modest amount of $100 to be payable by Applicant’s counsel personally."

Sanction teardown · Ottawa, Canada · 2025-06-24

Hussein v. Canada

What happened

In Ottawa, Canada, a filing relied on Visto.Ai to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Applicant’s counsel cited several non-existent cases in the written submissions (offending factum); the Court issued four directions before counsel admitted AI use caused the error.

Which AI tool

Visto.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

Monetary Sanction (monetary penalty: 100 CAD.)

Additional detail

In the original order, the court held:"[38] Applicants’ counsel provided further correspondence advising, for the first time, of his reliance on Visto.ai described as a professional legal research platform designed specifically for Canadian immigration and refugee law practitioners. He also indicated that he did not independently verify the citations as they were understood to reflect well established and widely accepted principles of law. In other words, the undeclared and unverified artificial intelligence had no impact, and the substantive legal argument was unaffected and supported by other cases.[39] I do not accept that this is permissible. The use of generative artificial intelligence is increasingly common and a perfectly valid tool for counsel to use; however, in this Court, its use must be declared and as a matter of both practice, good sense and professionalism, its output must be verified by a human. The Court cannot be expected to spend time hunting for cases which do not exist or considering erroneous propositions of law.[40] In fact, the two case hallucinations were not the full extent of the failure of the artificial intelligence product used. It also hallucinated the proper test for the admission on judicial review of evidence not before the decision-maker and cited, as authority, a case which had no bearing on the issue at all. To be clear, this was not a situation of a stray case with a variation of the established test but, rather, an approach similar to the test for new evidence on appeal. As noted above, the case relied upon in support of the wrong test (Cepeda-Gutierrez) has nothing to do with the issue. I note in passing that the case comprises 29 paragraphs and would take only a few minutes to review.[41] In addition, counsel’s reliance on artificial intelligence was not revealed until after the issuance of four Directions. I find that this amounts to an attempt to mislead the Court and to conceal the reliance by describing the hallucinated authorities as “mis-cited” Had the initial request for a Book of Authorities resulted in the explanation in the last letter, I may have been more sympathetic. As matters stand, I am concerned that counsel does not recognize the seriousness of the issue."In the final order, the court added:"While the use of generative AI is not the responsibility of the responding party, it was not appropriate for the Respondent to not make any response to the Court’s four directions and Order. Indeed, assuming that the Respondent noticed the hallucinated cases on receipt of the written argument, it should have brought this to the attention of the Court.[...]Given that Applicant’s counsel was not remunerated for his services in the file, which included the motion on which the offending factum was filed and a motion for a stay of removal and, in addition, that I am also of the view that the Respondent’s lack of action exacerbated matters and it should not benefit as a result, I am ordering a modest amount of $100 to be payable by Applicant’s counsel personally."

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/573/Hussein_v._Canada_Canada_24_June_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).