Tag: AI in Court

From Judge Sharion Aycock (N.D. Miss.) yesterday in Billups v. Louisville Municipal School Dist.:

The Court also observes that the Defendant … could have flagged the fictious citation and misrepresentation of case law [by Plaintiff’s counsel] in a reply brief or supplemental filing. The Court takes this opportunity to issue a charge. Going forward, the Court expects all parties to assist in maintaining the integrity of the judicial process and to be diligent in flagging AI misuse. “[O]therwise, the risk is too great that such errors will persist undetected, potentially leading to an outcome unsupported by law.” Elizondo v. City of Laredo (S.D. Tex. 2025).

Judge Marina Garcia Marmolejo’s order in Elizondo does indeed take the same view:

The Court also observes that Defendant, the City of Laredo, could have flagged these fictitious citations in a reply brief or supplemental filing. Although this oversight does not rise to the level of sanctionable conduct, the Court expects all parties to assist in maintaining the integrity of the judicial process by alerting the Court to such errors. The Court encourages greater diligence in flagging citation errors in the future— otherwise, the risk is too great that such errors will persist undetected, potentially leading to an outcome unsupported by law.

To be sure, lawyers often need no prompting to alert the court to errors by the other side. But sometimes they might feel reluctant to look like they’re piling on with objections, especially when the erroneous citation is on a tangential point, or when they think they’ve already destroyed the other side’s arguments on the merits. And sometimes they might be reluctant to spend their time and the client’s money on putting together a list of errors by the other side (especially when that requires a whole new supplemental filing).

These decisions show that, despite that, alerting the court to all the citation errors you found in the other side’s filings may be important to maintaining the court’s confidence and goodwill. They can be useful citations if you do want to file such a list of errors but are afraid that a different judge will fault you for piling on. And they can be worth noting to your client if you want to explain why you’re spending time and money on listing (and verifying and explaining) the other side’s errors.

From Russell v. Mells, decided yesterday by Florida Court of Appeal (Second District) Chief Judge Matthew Lucas, joined by Judges Robert Morris and Susan H. Rothstein-Youakim:

Because [one] case citation [in defense counsel Attorney McLane’s filing] appeared to have been “hallucinated” (most likely by a generative artificial intelligence program) and because the other two case citations contained misquotations, we issued an order to show cause to appellee’s counsel. In our order, we directed counsel to file a written response explaining how these case citations and quotations were generated. We further warned that the response should also show cause as to why sanctions shouldn’t be imposed.

In her response, Attorney McLane stated that the three case citations “were researched via computer generated searches” and acknowledged that she “failed to fully vet these searches.” With respect to the two misquotations, she stated that “the errors … were not substantive in nature and were primarily the result of miss placed [sic] quotation marks.” She conceded that the citation to “Cade v. Roberts” was “substantive but was not made for the purpose of misleading the Court.” She then noted that there was Florida case law supporting “the substance of the argument” on this point, presumably meaning that the quoted text in her brief about motions to dismiss could find support elsewhere in Florida law. {She never tells us where, and there is no text we’ve found in Florida law that directly matches the purported quotation she set forth in the brief. But substantively Ms. McLane is correct.}

Lastly, we couldn’t help but notice, the signature line of counsel’s response to our order to show cause appears to have been executed by someone on behalf of Ms. McLane, instead of by Ms. McLane herself. {While a delegated signature execution may not have been a legal or ethical impropriety, under these circumstances, it certainly didn’t make a good impression. In the future, our orders to show cause for these kinds of matters will specify that counsel must personally execute the written response, though that point really should not need to be stated.}

In essence, counsel has told us that her “computer generated searches” misstated the law but that she didn’t mean to mislead the court when she filed those misstatements. We will take her at her word about her intentions. But what counsel seems to imply—that since the substance of the analysis in her brief wasn’t necessarily wrong, her misstatements are not an issue we should be overly concerned about—is simply unacceptable. Indeed, we are deeply troubled by this brief and by this attorney’s response.

The judges on this panel have, collectively, served for over fifty years as judicial officers. We have over a hundred years of experience as members of the Florida Bar. Before becoming appellate or trial judges, we practiced in state and federal courts in a wide variety of cases throughout the State of Florida. None of us can recall an instance when an attorney accidentally submitted a completely fabricated case as a legal authority to a court of law—not until the recent advent of generative artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately, we’re finding this problem arising more and more frequently…. When a lawyer cites imaginary legal authorities to our court as if they were law, we are compelled to refer that lawyer to the Bar because of the professional rules of conduct. [The court did indeed do so here. -EV]

It doesn’t take much moral imagination to understand why. As judges, we rely on attorneys to ethically represent their clients. We expect that representation to be zealous, honest, and competent. Indeed, lawyers owe the courts and their clients a duty to practice with competence and candor. By signing an appellate brief, a lawyer certifies that he or she has read the document and that to the best of the lawyer’s knowledge, information, and belief there are “good grounds to support the document.”

These ethical requirements are not excused simply because a computer program generated a faulty or misleading legal analysis. Nor is it an excuse that the attorney did not intend to mislead the court. “To state the obvious, it is a fundamental duty of attorneys to read the legal authorities they cite in appellate briefs or any other court filings to determine that the authorities stand for the propositions for which they are cited.”

Obviously, that didn’t happen when Ms. McLane filed this answer brief. Instead, counsel “fundamentally abdicated” her duty to the court and her client when she submitted this filing without verifying that the three cases cited in her brief said what she claimed they said. Accordingly, it is our duty to refer this matter to the Florida Bar to proceed as it deems appropriate.

We are publishing this aspect of the case with the hope that it will remind attorneys that technological advances do not dispense with ethical obligations….

From Monday’s opinion by Justice Frank Menetrez, joined by Justices Richard Fields and Michael Raphael, in Schlichter v. Kennedy:

Grotke’s approach differs from those taken by the attorneys in Noland and Alvarez [two previous cases involving hallucinated citations]. Grotke has not admitted that the Writ and the AOB [Appellant’s Opening Brief] contain hallucinated citations that were produced by generative AI. Grotke admitted that he used AI in some fashion when preparing the AOB and that it was “possible” that he used AI in some fashion when preparing the Writ. But he maintains that the four spurious citations resulted from clerical error and that he intended to cite the actually existing cases for the propositions described in the declaration that he filed in response to our order to show cause. We find that Grotke’s claims are not credible.

It is difficult to understand how Grotke’s four spurious citations could possibly be mere clerical errors, and Grotke has not intelligibly explained how it would be possible. The spurious citations do not involve the mere omission or addition or transposition of one or several digits. Rather, all four spurious citations are completely different from the correct citations for the actually existing cases that have those case names. Grotke’s spurious citations bear the hallmarks of hallucinated citations produced by generative AI. “[H]allucinated cases look like real cases. They are identified by a case name, a citation to a reporter, the name of a district or appellate court, and the year of the decision. [Citation.] But, they are not real cases.”

Grotke’s claim that he intended to cite the actually existing cases is similarly lacking in credibility. The actually existing cases do not support the legal propositions for which Grotke provided the spurious citations in the Writ and the AOB. Consequently, it would make no sense for Grotke to claim that he intended to cite the actually existing cases to support those legal propositions. Grotke attempts to avoid that problem by claiming that he cited the four cases for various other legal propositions, which he describes in his declaration. But the attempt fails, because the legal propositions described in his declaration are not the legal propositions in the Writ and the AOB for which the spurious citations were provided as authority.

For all of these reasons, we conclude that Grotke’s repeated claims that the spurious citations resulted from clerical errors unrelated to the use of generative AI are not credible.

Other parts of Grotke’s response show a similar lack of candor and credibility. Grotke claimed in his declaration that the spurious citations “resulted from a breakdown in [his] citation-verification process during compilation from vLex.” But Grotke admitted at the hearing that before receiving our order of September 19, 2025, he had never signed up for or had a membership on vLex but merely used it “on and off” or “here and there.”

Insofar as Grotke claims that he did check the four cases—by searching for them either by case name or by volume and page number citation—before filing the Writ and the AOB, the claim is not credible. If Grotke had tried to check the cases by volume and page number citations, then he would have discovered that the cases do not exist. Grotke admits that is what happened when he searched for the cases in response to our order of September 19, 2025. And if Grotke had tried to check the cases by case names, then he would have discovered that the actually existing cases do not stand for the propositions for which he was citing them.

We agree with Noland and Alvarez that “attorneys must check every citation to make sure the case exists and the citations are correct. [Citation.] Attorneys should not cite cases for legal propositions different from those contained in the cases cited. [Citation.] And attorneys cannot delegate this responsibility to any form of technology; this is the responsibility of a competent attorney.” As explained by Alvarez, “[h]onesty in dealing with the courts is of paramount importance, and misleading a judge is, regardless of motives, a serious offense.”

For all of the foregoing reasons, we find that Grotke has failed to show cause why he should not be sanctioned for relying on fabricated legal authority in the Writ and the AOB…. [W]e issue a sanction in the amount of $1,750 to be paid by Grotke individually …. We direct the Clerk of this court to notify the State Bar of the sanctions against Grotke.

I e-mailed the lawyer to see if he had a response, and he said this:

The cases were real, not hallucinations, though I have seen AI hallucinate cases in the past.  The cites were just mistaken as to where they were located, page number, volume, etc. I reviewed the cases and included them because they were relevant. I believed that I had the correct cites because they were relevant, but somewhere along the way, maybe AI being the cause, I obtained the wrong cites. As I explained to the court, if I knew exactly why they were incorrect, they would not have been submitted that way.