A federal magistrate judge in the District of Oregon sanctioned two lawyers a combined $110,204.38 for filing summary-judgment briefs that cited 15 nonexistent cases and 8 fabricated quotations generated with AI.
Four siblings fighting over a family winery after their mother's death, and a 12 million dollar claim. Over five months and three separate briefs on cross-motions for summary judgment, the plaintiffs' lawyers filed fifteen cases that do not exist and eight quotations attributed to real decisions that do not contain them. The judge called it a notorious outlier in degree and volume. At roughly 110,000 US dollars it is the largest penalty for fabricated citations in any United States court to date, three years after Mata v. Avianca set the going rate at 5,000. The tracking database held 2,023 decisions worldwide where a court has had to respond to hallucinated material when it was last counted, in September 2026, and the sanctions have reached bar suspensions.
