Asked to "synthesize complex matters" for an appeal to the Illinois Appellate Court, a premier corporate subscription to ChatGPT returned authority that read like ordinary legal writing: four fabrications of statutory language, one citation to a case that does not exist, three quotations attributed to real opinions that cannot be found in them, and two mis-citations offered for propositions the cited cases do not support. The fabricated statutory requirement was presented as settled law in the opening brief and carried forward, unchanged, into the reply brief.
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Expert: Illinois Appellate Court, First District, Opinion in Scott v. Illinois Human Rights Comm'n, 2026 IL App (1st) 251462 The court found the briefs contained four fabrications of statutory language, one citation to a case that does not exist, three quotations attributed to real opinions that cannot be found in them, and two authorities cited for propositions they do not support. Counsel acknowledged the citations were false and told the court he "frequently use[s] a premier corporate subscription to ChatGPT" to "synthesize complex matters," this appeal included. He said he had personally verified every citation through LexisNexis but that these had eluded him, and attributed the failure to inexperience with appellate work. Two parts of the ruling matter more than the arithmetic. First, the sanction was $1,500 per transgression, $15,000 in total, and the court said the flat rate was deliberately higher than in earlier cases for two stated reasons: there is "no meaningful difference between the various types of false citations and quotations," and AI-hallucinated citations are "an increasingly persistent problem in courts nationwide" that existing fines are not deterring. Courts, it wrote, "have no choice but to increase fines . . . until those fines have a significant deterrent effect." It rejected the framing that AI hallucinations are simply "technical deficiencies" or an unavoidable hazard of modern practice. Second, the penalty was for conduct, not for tool use. Counsel was found to have willfully violated Rule 341(h)(5) because he kept the sham statutory requirement in his reply brief after it was challenged, and because an argument built on a non-existent statutory requirement is frivolous. His show-cause response itself contained misstatements of law and was called "yet another sloppy filing." He was also reported to the ARDC; the court weighed ordering CLE and service of the opinion on every judge with a pending matter, but declined for lack of clear authority under Supreme Court Rule 375. The limit of the ruling is worth stating. Fictitious authorities do not automatically strike a brief or kill an appeal: the plaintiff was appealing the dismissal of a workplace racial discrimination charge, and the court affirmed on the record and the pertinent statutory law. The exposure here runs to the lawyer who signed the filing - and a subscription tier does not change the verification requirement. Opening the authority and reading it is the check; a paid AI research feature is not. Source: https://applawyers.org/blog/13677902
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