Sanction teardown · Supreme Court of Queensland, Australia · 2025-09-03
Mark Khoury v Nira Kooij
What happened
In Supreme Court of Queensland, 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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Fabricated (Case Law)Applicant relied on a case name (redacted) purportedly reported at [2017] QSC 105 and quoted from it; the Court could not find the cited name or the quoted passage.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Applicant cited Macedonian Orthodox Community Church St Petka v His Eminence Petar [2008] HCA 42 and relied on paragraph [123] for a proposition; the case exists but paragraph [123] does not support the point advanced.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Applicant referred to two further cases (redacted) which the Court found do not exist when searched.
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Misrepresented (Legal Norm)Applicant cited 's 54(1)(a) of the Succession Act 1981'—the section exists but there is no subparagraph (a); the statutory citation is incorrect.
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
Application dismissed (monetary penalty: 1 .)
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/764/Mark_Khoury_v_Nira_Kooij_2025_QSC_217_3_September_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).