Articles on criminal law, civil litigation, family & corporate law from a Kota-based advocate.
A federal court in Michigan denied a motion for relief from judgment in a case where Westlaw editors flagged the filed submissions as containing non-existent citations generated by ChatGPT and OpenAI tools. The case is another data point in the escalating judicial reckoning with generative AI in legal practice.
The Appellate Court of Maryland flagged non-existent case citations in a divorce appeal brief — citations that did not exist and were likely AI-generated. The Westlaw editor’s note explicitly identifies the decision as containing ‘incorrect or non-existent’ references, a pattern courts are increasingly calling out.
A federal court in Oklahoma warned an attorney that future AI-generated fake citations could lead to sanctions or the striking of filings. Though no sanctions were imposed this time, the court’s rebuke signals escalating judicial intolerance for unverified AI-generated legal research.
A federal patent court in Kansas ordered all signing attorneys for patent plaintiff Lexos Media to show cause why they should not be sanctioned and referred to disciplinary administrators for submitting AI-generated defective legal citations in both a summary judgment response and an expert witness brief.
A Michigan federal court remanded a Social Security disability case while warning plaintiff’s counsel that a cited case — Fleck v. Commissioner of Social Security — appeared to be a ‘phantom’ case likely generated by AI. The court warned that future AI-generated unconfirmed citations could result in sanctions.
A Massachusetts federal court referred attorney Roger Peace to the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers after he submitted AI-generated citations to nonexistent authority and gave an evasive response to the court’s show-cause order. The referral — rather than a direct sanction — represents a new mechanism for AI citation accountability.
The Pennsylvania Superior Court published a decision in a car loan dispute where court submissions contained AI/LLM-generated citations to cases that do not exist. The Westlaw annotation explicitly identifies large language model (LLM) hallucinations as the source, marking one of the first state appellate courts to use that specific terminology.
A Florida federal court held a sanctions hearing over AI-generated fake citations submitted in two consolidated employment cases, warning that ‘the use of AI as a legal research tool does not alter’ lawyers’ basic ethical obligation to provide true and accurate citations to the court.
A Chicago pro se plaintiff brought Fair Housing Act claims against his landlords, but his filings contained references to cases that do not exist. The N.D. Illinois court granted dismissal of some claims while flagging the hallucinated citations in its published opinion.
A federal court in Michigan denied a motion for relief from judgment in a case where Westlaw editors flagged the filed submissions as containing non-existent citations generated by ChatGPT and OpenAI tools. The case is another data point in the escalating judicial reckoning with generative AI in legal practice.