While briefing cross-motions for summary judgment in a $12 million Oregon vineyard inheritance dispute, the plaintiff's attorneys filed three briefs that had been drafted with the help of an AI tool. The filings contained 15 references to "nonexistent cases" and eight fabricated quotations, all written in ordinary legal citation form, with case names, reporters and pin cites presented as if they were real authority. Nothing in the briefs told the court which passages came from the AI tool, or that the authority had not been checked. The fabricated material was only identified after the defendants' attorneys flagged it. Once the errors surfaced, attorney Stephen Brigandi deleted the false references and refiled the argument - without checking the rest of the briefs, which the court later found still contained misstatements of law. The court's opinion does not identify the specific AI product used, and no party produced the prompts or chat logs. The judge noted "circumstantial" but "persuasive" evidence that the client, Joanne Couvrette - described by the defense as a serial self-represented litigant - was likely the person who used AI to draft the briefs, but held that it was the attorneys who signed their names to the filings.
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Expert: Judge Mark D. Clarke, U.S. Magistrate Judge, District of Oregon Judge Mark D. Clarke dismissed the case with prejudice and imposed a total of $110,000 in fines and attorney fees against the two lawyers, calling the volume of fabricated authority an outlier even among the growing docket of AI sanctions cases. "In the quickly expanding universe of cases involving sanctions for the misuse of artificial intelligence, this case is a notorious outlier in both degree and volume," Clarke wrote in his Dec. 12 opinion. "Plaintiffs and their counsel have not been adequately forthcoming, candid or apologetic about their conduct." On the attempt to quietly remove the fake citations, the judge wrote: "Rather than a correction, Mr. Brigandi attempted a cover-up. He failed at both." He added that there was "no evidence that Mr. Brigandi took any steps to verify the veracity of the legal arguments" in the amended briefing, and on the sanctions question: "If there was ever an 'appropriate case' to grant terminating sanctions for the misuse of artificial intelligence, this is it." The penalties: San Diego attorney Stephen Brigandi - $80,000 of the opposing side's attorney fees plus $15,000 in fines for the 15 nonexistent cases and eight fabricated quotations; Portland attorney Tim Murphy, who served as local counsel because Brigandi was not licensed in Oregon, $14,000 in additional fees. Clarke rejected the idea that local counsel's procedural role excused him, writing that the law "requires local counsel to provide more than an OSB number and a signature." It is the largest AI-hallucination penalty imposed by an Oregon federal judge. The state's appellate court record, by comparison, tops out at $10,000. The case illustrates the part of the problem that is not really about model accuracy: fabricated authority arrived in the same citation format as real authority, was signed by licensed lawyers, and survived until opposing counsel checked every case. Verification of machine-drafted legal text was treated as optional - and the sanction landed on the humans who filed it, not on the tool, which the opinion never names. Sources: ABA Journal, April 17, 2026 (quoting Judge Clarke's Dec. 12 opinion); OregonLive.com, April 15, 2026. Source: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/oregon-federal-judge-hands-down-110000-penalty-for-ai-errors
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