Answering as a lawyer's research assistant, the tool supplied authority for opposing a request for shared custody and visitation of a jointly owned dog: "Twigg", cited for the proposition that courts should prioritise the parties' emotional well-being and stability. No such case exists. A second authority, "Teegarden", was a real case but carried a different official citation and did not support the proposition it was cited for. When the invented authority was challenged on appeal, counsel told the court the cases were "legitimate" and accused opposing counsel of "misrepresentation, likely stemming from inadequate database searches or unfamiliarity with standard legal reporters". She then accepted that the citation to Twigg was erroneous due to a "typographical mistake" - and the correction she supplied was itself fictitious. Only after the Court of Appeal ordered her to produce the decisions from an official reporter did she admit Twigg did not exist and had allegedly been found on a Reddit thread. At oral argument she admitted she had no paid subscription to a legal research service, that she was using AI to conduct legal research, and that Twigg and Teegarden may have been obtained using AI tools.
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Expert: California Court of Appeal, In re Domestic Partnership of Campos and Munoz (2026) 118 Cal. App. 5th 1112, Opinion holding reliance on fabricated case law an abuse of discretion, and imposing sanctions on counsel The Court of Appeal held it "an abuse of discretion for a court to rely in material part on fictional case authorities in rendering a decision or making an order", adding that "[r]eliance on fake cases is fundamentally incompatible with an informed exercise of discretion controlled by genuine principles of law. It seriously undermines the integrity of the outcome and erodes public confidence in our judicial system. It can also hinder meaningful appellate review." The fakes were not caught before they did their work. The trial court denied the request for custody and visitation of the dog, and its written order - drafted by the appellant's own attorney - repeated and relied on the same fabricated citations. Neither the parties nor the court verified the authorities before the order was entered. Counsel was sanctioned. The court found that relying on fake case citations is sanctionable because it "constitutes unreasonable violation of the [California Rules of Professional Conduct] requiring that each point be supported by actual legal authority and prohibiting citation of unpublished authorities", and that the conduct "falls far short of" an attorney's duty of candor with the court. What aggravated it was not the original error but the response to it: the court highlighted that counsel "persisted in this conduct even after being alerted to the fake authorities" - doubling down on the fake citations rather than coming clean. The appellant established the error and still lost. The Court of Appeal reinstated the appeal and held the trial court had abused its discretion, but applied the doctrine of forfeiture, because his own counsel had drafted and filed the proposed order containing the fake citations and no objection had been made below. "Simply stated, no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations . . . that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified," the court said. It declined to excuse the forfeiture because doing so would effectively excuse the appellant's own breach of the duty to the court in submitting an unverified proposed order. The pattern is the point. AI tools generate case names, citations and explanations that read as authoritative and polished, but they are not inherently reliable sources of truth - and even when a real case is named, it may not stand for the proposition cited. The error compounded: it was repeated in filings, relied on by the trial court in its reasoning, and incorporated into the final order. Opposing counsel and courts have to verify citations too, and promptly; the appellant's own counsel never faced sanctions over the fake citations, but his failure to verify them cost his client the appeal. Source: https://www.aalrr.com/Business-Law-Journal/a-plaintiff-a-defendant-and-a-judge-walk-into-an-ai-trap
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