What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Plaintiff cited 'Hagen v. Williams, No. 2:18-cv-00425, 2020 WL 1272618,' but the court found the case name, docket number, and database identifier do not correspond and the citation appears nonexistent. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Plaintiff cited 'U.S. ex rel. Poehling v. UnitedHealth Grp., Inc., 2018 WL 845548, at *5,' but the court concluded the case name exists while the database identifier/electronic report number provided does not correspond and the cited order does not support Plaintiff's parenthetical explanation. || False Quotes: Case Law | Plaintiff cited language to 'Solis v. Zenith Capital, LLC, No. C 08-4854 PJH, 2009 WL 1324051, at *3,' but the court found the quoted material does not appear in the order cited and the order does not address the issue Plaintiff attributed to it.

Sanction teardown · D. Nevada, USA · 2025-12-10

James Fahey v. Wally’s Las Vegas, LLC, et al.

What happened

In D. Nevada, 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 (Case Law)

Plaintiff cited 'Hagen v. Williams, No. 2:18-cv-00425, 2020 WL 1272618,' but the court found the case name, docket number, and database identifier do not correspond and the citation appears nonexistent.
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Plaintiff cited 'U.S. ex rel. Poehling v. UnitedHealth Grp., Inc., 2018 WL 845548, at *5,' but the court concluded the case name exists while the database identifier/electronic report number provided does not correspond and the cited order does not support Plaintiff's parenthetical explanation.
False Quotes (Case Law)

Plaintiff cited language to 'Solis v. Zenith Capital, LLC, No. C 08-4854 PJH, 2009 WL 1324051, at *3,' but the court found the quoted material does not appear in the order cited and the order does not address the issue Plaintiff attributed to it.

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

Warning

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/1166/Fahey_v_Wallys_Las_Vegas_USA_10_December_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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