What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Court observed that earlier plaintiff filings contained fabricated case citations; counsel was previously sanctioned for inappropriate use of AI (Doc.149). || Misrepresented: Legal Norm | Brief asserted that 'Withholding responsive material that are ready for production, while seeking additional time for other items, is itself sanctionable under Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(b).' Court found Rule 37(b) makes no such statement and no supporting case law was provided.

Details

The court noted prior fabricated citations in plaintiff's earlier briefing (for which counsel had already been sanctioned). In the current filing the court found no fabricated citations but identified inaccurate legal contentions—e.g., a rule statement claiming withholding ready-to-produce material while seeking extra time is sanctionable under Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(b)—which the court found unsupported and incorrect. The court suspected plaintiff used AI again, but simply removed the citations. The court admonished counsel to review AI-generated work and comply with Rule 11 but did not impose additional sanctions here.

Sanction teardown · D. New Mexico, USA · 2025-10-08

Lipe v. Albuquerque Public Schools (2)

What happened

In D. New Mexico, 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)

Court observed that earlier plaintiff filings contained fabricated case citations; counsel was previously sanctioned for inappropriate use of AI (Doc.149).
Misrepresented (Legal Norm)

Brief asserted that 'Withholding responsive material that are ready for production, while seeking additional time for other items, is itself sanctionable under Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(b).' Court found Rule 37(b) makes no such statement and no supporting case law was provided.

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

Additional detail

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/863/Lipe_v._Albuqueruqe.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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