Well, you can officially add “almost fooled a federal judge” to the ever-expanding portfolio of artificial intelligence blunders. As described in Ars Technica’s report, an experienced legal team—yes, the kind that lives and breathes meticulous detail—was recently sanctioned $31,100 after submitting court briefs festooned with fake, AI-generated legal citations so convincing they nearly found their way into a judicial order.
When the Courtroom Gets Uncanny
Judge Michael Wilner, serving as special master in the Central District of California, admitted in a May 5 order to being “affirmatively misled” by legal briefs stuffed with imaginary case law. He didn’t just skim them—he found the authorities cited genuinely intriguing and almost referenced them in an official order, only to discover, after digging a little deeper, that the cases simply did not exist. If the idea of almost memorializing fiction in legal history isn’t unsettling enough, Wilner even described the close call as “scary”—hardly a word you expect to see in a federal court filing.
All of this, as detailed in the outlet, unfolded in a lawsuit brought by former Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey. Her legal team, drawn from the national powerhouse K&L Gates and the California-based Ellis George LLP, is generally regarded as reputable—legal scholar Eugene Volokh highlighted their impressive records in his own commentary on the episode. Yet, despite their considerable resources and reputation, this was, in Wilner’s words, a “collective debacle.”
The Curious Case of the Nonexistent Case
The trouble began when Trent Copeland, an attorney at Ellis George, turned to “various AI tools” for generating an outline that would soon morph into a formal legal brief. The document, as the court record shows, contained numerous fabricated citations—nine out of 27 references in a mere ten pages were incorrect, at least two hailed from nowhere at all, and several quotations attributed to real opinions were pure invention. Showing just how easily the temptation of a time-saving shortcut can mushroom, Copeland’s AI-created outline was handed over to the K&L Gates team, who then incorporated its content into the official filing. Shockingly, not a single member of either firm, from attorneys to staff, checked the citations before sending the document to Wilner’s desk.
Earlier in the same report, it’s mentioned that when Wilner first encountered two citations he couldn’t locate, he flagged the issue to the team. Their response? Submit a revised brief that simply removed the disputed citations while quietly leaving several other questionable “authorities” intact. The unraveling of the true extent of the AI’s contribution only occurred after Wilner pressed them for a more comprehensive explanation, at which point the apologies and admissions began rolling in.
Artificial Intelligence, Old-Fashioned Negligence
The court’s critique went beyond mere embarrassment. In a detail highlighted by Ars Technica, Wilner called out both the reliance on unvetted AI tools and the subsequent failure of the K&L Gates team to vet research submitted to them. He wrote that “no reasonably competent attorney should out-source research and writing to this technology—particularly without any attempt to verify the accuracy of that material.” While the AI’s fabrications tended to align, roughly, with the area of law in question, Wilner waved off any suggestion this was harmless; accuracy, he stressed, is not optional in legal proceedings.
Collectively, the law firms “acted in a manner that was tantamount to bad faith,” wrote Wilner, whose clear frustration didn’t stretch so far as to sanction the individual attorneys themselves. While the financial penalties—$26,100 to the defense for mediation fees, another $5,000 to cover additional costs—were levied against the firms, Wilner also recognized the lawyers’ candor and their “profuse apologies,” deciding not to add further personal penalties.
Missed Red Flags and Machine Mirage
What truly stands out here—beyond the AI’s flair for plausible-sounding nonsense—is the perfect storm of human complacency. How did a “large team of attorneys,” as Wilner described them, operating in environments built on precision and verification, let not just a couple but a whole wave of fake legal references pass unchallenged? The outlet also notes this wasn’t some lone overworked solo attorney desperately trying to make a deadline; it was a collaboration between institutions that should, one imagines, have safety nets for exactly this kind of thing.
Does modern legal practice encourage over-delegation, or was this simply a matter of collective blind spots when it comes to emerging tech? And with generative AI now able to thread together citations that “aren’t too far off the mark,” as Wilner observed, how many more subtle hallucinations are passing quietly in smaller courts, or even outside the world of law altogether?
A Quiet Lesson (and a Not-So-Quiet Bill)
In reflecting on this latest episode of artificial intelligence blending into official reality, it’s tempting to just marvel at the absurdity. But the uncomfortable truth is that, even in storied courtrooms staffed by pedigreed attorneys and veteran judges, the boundary between fact and fiction is increasingly easy to blur if no one stops to check. Perhaps the real issue isn’t AI’s innovation, but the all-too-human tendency to trust an answer that arrives quickly and confidently. If even judges can nearly be persuaded by digital phantoms, what about the rest of us?
