What tools are you using to protect yourself from fake AI citations or misstatements in filed pleadings (that may have been added accidentally by you, your clients, or co-counsel)?
See below for pertinent details on how attorneys from even the largest firms ended up embarrassed and sanctioned in the latest cases involving failure to check pleadings.
Some of these lawyers even used legal-specific AI tools like Westlaw CoCounsel and Westlaw Precision to draft - and in one case used Westlaw Precision to analyze the brief to flag "any obviously bad caselaw."
These firms could have used Clearbrief's tools to make it possible for humans to quickly lay eyes on every cited source before filing their Word document under tight deadlines.
Read on to learn how you can use cite-checking tools in Word to ensure you never end up on the front page for the wrong reasons. We've even added new functionality this month to help address all the possible types of hallucinations.
Lacey v. State Farm Gen. Ins. Co., No. cv-24-05205 FMO (MAAx) (C.D. Cal. May 6, 2025)
- K&L Gates and Ellis George attorneys were sanctioned jointly and severally, and fined $31,100.00 for submitting briefs that “contained numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations.”
- Lawyers at Ellis George had used CoCounsel, Westlaw Precision, and Google Gemini to perform legal research and K&L Gates, cooperating counsel, did not check it over before filing it.
- The judge found that 1/3 of the citations (9 of 27) were incorrect (citations did not exist at all or misstated the law).
- Read more coverage: 1, 2, 3
Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:24-cv-03811-EKL-SVK (N.D. Cal. 15 May, 2025)
- Latham & Watkins attorneys asked Claude.ai to help them format legal citations in an expert witness declaration on behalf of their client, Anthropic, and the AI changed the author name and title of a cited article.
- "I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article," Dukanovic confessed. "Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors. Our manual citation check did not catch that error."
- Read more coverage: 1, 2, 3
Johnson v. Dunn, No. 2:21-CV-01701-AMM (N.D. Ala. 19 May, 2025)
- Despite a firm policy requiring attorneys to check over work product generated by using AI, attorneys at Butler Snow used ChatGPT and submitted a brief containing citations to cases that did not exist as well as incorrect legal interpretations of real cases cited.
- "US district judge Anna Manasco said that she was considering a wide range of sanctions - including fines, mandated continuing legal education, referrals to licensing organizations and temporary suspensions[.]"
- Read more coverage: 1, 2, 3
P.R. Soccer League NFP Corp. v. Federación Puertorriqueña de Futbol, No. 3:23-cv-01203-RAM-MDM, (D.P.R. Apr. 10, 2025)
- A judge awarded Paul Weiss attorneys significant fees (more than $50,000) that their opposing counsel must pay due to a firm filing motions containing numerous fake citations in a FIFA antitrust suit.
- The plaintiff's filings cited to cases that did not exist and fabricated quotations that either misrepresented legal principles or expressly contradicted the holding of the case.
- Read more coverage: 1, 2
Coomer v. Lindell, No. 22-cv-01129-NYW-SBP (D. Colo. Apr. 23, 2025)
- Attorneys from a small firm representing Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, admitted to using generative AI after submitting a filing to the court that contained approximately 30 incorrect citations -citations to hallucinated cases which do not exist, misstatements of law and legal principles, cases being attributed to incorrect jurisdictions, and incorrect quotations.
- Their correspondence filed in connection with the sanctions indicated that they analyzed the brief with Westlaw Precision before filing and it did not catch the mistakes.
- "I have also attached a Westlaw analysis of the entire brief - that basically goes through our brief and finds other cases that may be stronger. Note that I have already ADDED some of these cases or otherwise substituted them. This tool will find cases you cited that aren't good or otherwise relevant in a brief… But it didn't flag us for any obviously bad case law."
- Read more coverage: 1, 2, 3
United States v. Burke, No. 8:24-cr-00068-KKM-TGW, (M.D. Fla. May 13, 2025)
How to save your rep and $31K / $50K sanctions: "Clearbrief it" before filing.
Clearbrief's cite-checking tools inside Word solve your litigation team's burning pain points: Clearbrief analyzes any Word doc for inconsistencies between your writing and the cited source, and helps you easily spot Bluebooking mistakes, fake cases, and mis-matched quotes. Click on the play button above to watch our new 2 min video.
- Clearbrief automatically detects if the writing semantically matches the text in the source, displaying patented scoring so lawyers can easily spot all types of hallucinations due to genAI legal research (or just good, old-fashioned human error).
- Clearbrief automatically displays the trusted versions of the caselaw via integrations with LexisNexis and Fastcase vLex so your team's humans can lay their eyes on the source, fast, and create a hyperlinked version for the court with a click.
- Clearbrief is the only tool that automatically displays yourfact cites for easy verification - those can be prone to hallucinations too (like in the Latham / Anthropic case).
You can try Clearbrief yourself today - get access from the Microsoft Appsource Store or meet with our sales team for a tailored demo.
Don't let AI hallucinations ruin your career or your case!
