The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals recently sanctioned two lawyers over $100,000 for citing hallucinated cases in their appellate briefs.
The Court says the briefs “repeatedly misrepresented the record, cited non-existent case, and cites cases for propositions of law that they did not even discuss, much less support.” The Court sanctioned the lawyers under both Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38 and the Court’s inherent authority.
The Court included a string cite of the ever-growing case law on how citing fake cases violates Rule 11: “An attempt to persuade a court or oppose an adversary by relying on fake opinions is an abuse of the adversary system.”
- In a footnote, the court noted that “when AI is used to prepare a brief, AI hallucinations are more likely to occur when there are little to no existing authorities available that clearly satisfy the user’s request—such as, for example, when a lawyer asks a generative AI tool to supply a citation for an unsupported principle
