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Wertheimer v. Ryanair DAC

Court
Small Claims Court
Jurisdiction
Israel
Decided
2025-11-01
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Costs denied
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law

Details

The plaintiff, who is a lawyer , filed a claim for damages against Ryanair and included citations to several judgments to support his arguments. It was discovered that the plaintiff had used artificial intelligence to search for these judgments and/or draft the claim , and the cited cases "do not exist". The judge strongly condemned this conduct, stating it was improper and that the plaintiff's excuse for filing in haste was not acceptable. The non-existent citations were disregarded, and the court explicitly denied the plaintiff an award of costs (despite partially winning the claim) as a direct result of this conduct.

Sanction teardown · Small Claims Court, Israel · 2025-11-01

Wertheimer v. Ryanair DAC

What happened

In Small Claims Court, Israel, 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:

  • Issue
    Fabricated: Case Law

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

Costs denied

Additional detail

The plaintiff, who is a lawyer , filed a claim for damages against Ryanair and included citations to several judgments to support his arguments. It was discovered that the plaintiff had used artificial intelligence to search for these judgments and/or draft the claim , and the cited cases "do not exist". The judge strongly condemned this conduct, stating it was improper and that the plaintiff's excuse for filing in haste was not acceptable. The non-existent citations were disregarded, and the court explicitly denied the plaintiff an award of costs (despite partially winning the claim) as a direct result of this conduct.

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/977/Ryanair.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/977/Ryanair.pdf

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