What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Citations to non-existent cases or cases that do not support the legal propositions relied upon; Board warned it will disregard such information if relied upon at hearing. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Incomplete or misleading case citations generated with ChatGPT that misstate legal principles; Board emphasized parties must independently verify cases. || Fabricated: Exhibits & Submissions | Document titled 'veterinary opinions supporting the case' containing opinions from veterinarians not on the Ontario register and likely fabricated; admissibility to be determined under expert evidence rules.

Sanction teardown · Ontario's Animal Care Review Board, Canada · 2025-06-30

LaPointe v. Chief Animal Welfare Inspector

What happened

In Ontario's Animal Care Review Board, Canada, a filing relied on ChatGPT to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Citations to non-existent cases or cases that do not support the legal propositions relied upon; Board warned it will disregard such information if relied upon at hearing.
Misrepresented (Case Law)

Incomplete or misleading case citations generated with ChatGPT that misstate legal principles; Board emphasized parties must independently verify cases.
Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)

Document titled 'veterinary opinions supporting the case' containing opinions from veterinarians not on the Ontario register and likely fabricated; admissibility to be determined under expert evidence rules.

Which AI tool

ChatGPT. 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

AI-generated materials excluded from evidence

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/739/Lapointe_v._Chief_Animal_Welfare_Inspector_Canada_30_June_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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