{"id":119185,"date":"2025-05-15T15:03:43","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T23:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/05\/15\/ai-hallucinations-strike-again-two-more-cases-where-lawyers-face-judicial-wrath-for-fake-citations\/"},"modified":"2025-05-15T15:03:43","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T23:03:43","slug":"ai-hallucinations-strike-again-two-more-cases-where-lawyers-face-judicial-wrath-for-fake-citations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/05\/15\/ai-hallucinations-strike-again-two-more-cases-where-lawyers-face-judicial-wrath-for-fake-citations\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Hallucinations Strike Again: Two More Cases Where Lawyers Face Judicial Wrath For Fake Citations"},"content":{"rendered":"

The post AI Hallucinations Strike Again: Two More Cases Where Lawyers Face Judicial Wrath For Fake Citations<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In what has become a distressingly familiar pattern in courtrooms across America, two more cases have emerged of lawyers submitting briefs containing non-existent legal citations generated by AI tools.<\/p>\n

At this point, one wonders if the legal profession needs a mandatory continuing legal education course titled, \u201cHow to Avoid Becoming the Next AI Hallucination Headline.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even more distressing, perhaps, is that one of the cases involves a major international law firm known for its litigation prowess.<\/p>\n

Sanctions for AI-Generated Research<\/h3>\n

In the first of these two most-recent cases<\/a>, arising out the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, attorneys from the law firms Ellis George LLP and K&L Gates LLP submitted a brief to Special Master Michael Wilner<\/a> containing numerous hallucinated citations.<\/p>\n

The attorneys had used AI tools including CoCounsel, Westlaw Precision, and Google Gemini to outline and generate their brief.<\/p>\n

Trent Copeland, an attorney at Ellis George, admitted that he had used these AI tools to create an outline that he then shared with colleagues, including lawyers at K&L Gates, failing to mention its AI origins or to verify the citations. His colleagues incorporated the fabricated authorities into the final brief without checking them.<\/p>\n

When the special master initially questioned two suspicious citations, the attorneys filed a \u201ccorrected\u201d version, with a K&L Gates associate thanking the special master for catching the errors and assuring that citations in the revised brief had been \u201caddressed and update.\u201d<\/p>\n

Problem was, the corrected brief still contained at least six other AI-generated errors. In their declarations, the attorneys confessed that about nine of the 27 legal citations in their 10-page brief were incorrect in some way, including two completely non-existent cases.<\/p>\n

Special Master Wilner didn\u2019t mince words, finding that the attorneys had \u201ccollectively acted in a manner that was tantamount to bad faith.\u201d He chastised the lawyer who first generated the brief for relying on AI without verifying its accuracy, and for then sending the brief to his colleagues without disclosing its \u201csketchy AI origins.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also chastised the K&L Gates attorneys, calling their conduct \u201cdeeply troubling\u201d for their failure to check the validity of the research sent to them, both as to the original brief and the so-called corrected brief \u2014 after they had been put on notice of phony citations.<\/p>\n

As a result, the special master decided to impose sanctions, specifically:<\/p>\n