Sanction teardown · Victoria CAT, Australia · 2026-07-07
Laxton Construction Pty Ltd v EcoFit Electrical Pty Ltd
What happened
In Victoria CAT, Australia, 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:
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Briginshaw was cited as authority for a heightened approach to 'serious commercial allegations' (including unsupported large cash transactions); Tribunal found this to be a mischaracterisation of the case.
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Misrepresented (Legal Norm)Submission asserted the Civil Procedure Act 2010 (Vic) applied to proceedings in the Tribunal; Tribunal held this was incorrect.
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Misrepresented (Legal Norm)Submission relied on s 53 of the VCAT Act as authority for interest; Tribunal described this reference as inaccurate and unhelpful.
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
Not specified in source record.
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/2978/Laxton_Construction_Pty_Ltd_v_EcoFit_Electrical_Pty_Ltd_2026_VCAT_530_7_July_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).