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Musselman v. Vanderstelt

Court
CA British Columbia
Jurisdiction
Canada
Decided
2025-08-08
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Weighed in deciding to grant security for trial costs
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | One of two purported CanLII cases cited by the appellant to support that security for costs is exceptional could not be located; registry queried the citation; judge concluded it likely does not exist and was an AI 'hallucination'. || Fabricated: Case Law | Second purported CanLII case cited by the appellant likewise could not be located; appellant said she had erred copying the location; judge concluded it likely does not exist and was an AI 'hallucination'.

Sanction teardown · CA British Columbia, Canada · 2025-08-08

Musselman v. Vanderstelt

What happened

In CA British Columbia, Canada, 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)
    One of two purported CanLII cases cited by the appellant to support that security for costs is exceptional could not be located; registry queried the citation; judge concluded it likely does not exist and was an AI 'hallucination'.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Second purported CanLII case cited by the appellant likewise could not be located; appellant said she had erred copying the location; judge concluded it likely does not exist and was an AI 'hallucination'.

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

Weighed in deciding to grant security for trial costs

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/845/Musselman_v._Vanderstelt.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/845/Musselman_v._Vanderstelt.pdf

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