Sanction teardown · Queensland BCCMC, Australia · 2025-10-29
Sky Gardens
What happened
In Queensland BCCMC, 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 cited multiple authorities; adjudicator found several of the cited cases do not exist and at least one 'does not appear to exist at all'.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Applicant relied on existing cases but the adjudicator found two cases 'do not say the things the applicant asserts' (misstated holdings/quotes).
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Applicant cited a case under a different name and attributed quoted text not present in that decision.
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Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)Applicant referred to reports and invoices (e.g. a '13 February 2025' HVAC report, invoice/quote LDQ-1449, Draincare quote DC-5671) that were not produced when requested.
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
Adverse costs order for "misconceived and without substance" application (monetary penalty: 2000 AUD.)
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/1009/Sky_Gardens_Australia_29_October_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).