A lawyer in California was hit with sanctions by the courts after it was discovered that he had been citing cases that did not exist — and that were completely made up by artificial intelligence (AI) programs.
The Daily Journal reported :
By now, most attorneys are familiar with the limitations of artificial intelligence–particularly its tendency to produce fabricated citations and unreliable authority–but the California Court of Appeal has now made clear that those “hallucinations” can carry very real consequences.
In Noland v. Land of the Free, L.P. (B331918, Sept. 12, 2025), Division Three of the Second District sanctioned the plaintiff/appellant’s attorney $10,000 and reported him to the state bar after finding that nearly all of the legal quotations in his appellate briefs w