Published opinion, 7 October 2026 · source · PDF · 4 pages
We now address the defendants’ motion for sanctions against the plaintiffs and their counsel. Therein, the defendants state that the plaintiffs repeatedly cited to fabricated case law, both in the lower tribunal and in their initial brief, misrepresented the holdings of actual cases, and included fictional quotations from actual cases. The defendants note that this conduct compelled them to waste valuable time and money searching for cases that did not exist or reviewing cases which had no bearing on the issues on appeal.
Sept. 17, 2024), to falsely assert (including with fictional quotations) that the defendant bank made various admissions impacting this case; 2 (ii) citing a hallucinated case, Ogilvie v. Sebring Airport Authority , 841 So.
1998), for several propositions which are not accurately excerpted from the opinion. Because of these fabricated references to non-existent cases and inaccurately cited legal authorities, we issued an order to the plaintiffs to show cause why we should not strike the initial brief or impose other sanctions. See Order to Show Cause, Kid Int’l, LLC v.
The pro se complaint cited thirty-two cases total—fifteen were non-existent cases, two were accurately cited but misstated the holding, fourteen were inaccurately cited and contained misstated holdings, and only one of which was accurately cited with the correct holding.
2 The plaintiffs go so far as to argue that the federal case “is devastating to [the defendant bank’s] position.” 3 acknowledged the seriousness of the issues which we had identified and admitted that the initial brief “contained legal authorities, citations, quotations, and/or characterizations that were not adequately verified before filing.” He continued, “[c]ertain authorities did not exist as cited, while other citations or propositions attributed to authorities were inaccurate.” Ultimately, he fully accepted responsibility for these issues.
Additionally, counsel’s law firm incorporated generative artificial-intelligence (“AI”) technology as one component of the legal research and drafting process. Ultimately, counsel concluded that the initial brief’s errors occurred because his “verification process failed to identify before filing that certain authorities did not exist, were inaccurately cited, or did not support the propositions attributed[.]” Counsel stated that after we brought the citation issues to his attention, he attempted to correct the problem. He sought permission to replace the initial brief with an amended brief (though, alas, as counsel admitted, the amended brief did not resolve all the citation issues).
He also represented that he has changed his legal research and drafting procedures to ensure that legal authorities relied upon in court filings are independently located and checked against authoritative legal sources before filing. Based on counsel’s response to the order to show cause, we decided to proceed with the initial brief as filed, while disregarding the hallucinated citations and quotations, as well as the misrepresented holdings. See Friend v.
But there is still the matter of the defendants’ motion for sanctions. Recent cases have established that a party’s submission of hallucinated and inaccurately cited case law is sanctionable. See Francois v.