What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Solicitor tendered a list and summaries of 'relevant authorities' with medium neutral citations that were identified as inaccurate and admitted to be non-existent.

Details

Counsel admitted the list of authorities and accompanying summaries were generated by an AI research module embedded in his legal practice software. He stated he did not verify the content before submitting it. The judge found that neither Counsel nor any other legal practitioner at his firm had checked the validity of the generated output.The court accepted Counsel’s unconditional apology, noted remedial steps, and acknowledged his cooperation and candour. However, it nonetheless referred the matter to the Office of the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner under s 30 of the Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Act 2014 (Vic) for independent assessment. The referral was explicitly framed as non-punitive and in the public interest.In September 2025, the Board sanctioned Counsel, preventing him from acting as a principal lawyer or operate his own practice, and put him down for two years of supervision (see here).

Sanction teardown · Australia · 2024-08-19

In re Dayal

What happened

In Australia, a filing relied on LEAP to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Solicitor tendered a list and summaries of 'relevant authorities' with medium neutral citations that were identified as inaccurate and admitted to be non-existent.

Which AI tool

LEAP. 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

Referral to the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner for potential disciplinary review; no punitive order issued by the court itself; apology accepted.

Additional detail

Counsel admitted the list of authorities and accompanying summaries were generated by an AI research module embedded in his legal practice software. He stated he did not verify the content before submitting it. The judge found that neither Counsel nor any other legal practitioner at his firm had checked the validity of the generated output.The court accepted Counsel’s unconditional apology, noted remedial steps, and acknowledged his cooperation and candour. However, it nonetheless referred the matter to the Office of the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner under s 30 of the Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Act 2014 (Vic) for independent assessment. The referral was explicitly framed as non-punitive and in the public interest.In September 2025, the Board sanctioned Counsel, preventing him from acting as a principal lawyer or operate his own practice, and put him down for two years of supervision (see here).

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/361/In_Re_Dayal_Australia_August_27_2024.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).