AI is changing how legal work is drafted. Courts have not changed what they expect from the lawyer who signs it. Veritas verifies citations, validates holdings, and produces a defensible audit trail for every AI-assisted brief, before it leaves the firm.
The number above is our best estimate of monetary sanctions, cost orders, and fee-shifting awards levied on U.S. attorneys for filings containing AI-fabricated citations. It climbs from the conservative floor (publicly-reported direct sanctions only) to the defensible ceiling (including published cost orders and diverted court time).
Every entry below is from the public record: a sanctioned attorney, a disqualified counsel, a published warning. The professional rules have not changed: a lawyer is responsible for every citation in a filing they sign, regardless of who or what produced it.
Mata v. Avianca, Inc. Two attorneys submitted a brief citing six fabricated cases generated by ChatGPT. The judge wrote that he might not have sanctioned them had they come clean, but they didn't.
Mata v. Avianca, 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023)↗A Florida attorney was suspended from practicing in the Middle District of Florida after filing pleadings with cases that, in the court's words, were completely fabricated.
In re Neusom · 1-year suspension, March 8, 2024↗A California appellate court fined an attorney for filing an opening brief in which 21 of 23 quoted authorities were fabricated. The court published the opinion as a warning to the bar.
California 2nd District Court of Appeal, Sept. 2025↗Johnson v. Dunn. A large firm's hallucinated citation led the court to disqualify the offending attorneys, publish the opinion in the Federal Supplement, and direct the clerk to notify bar regulators in every state where they were licensed.
Johnson v. Dunn, No. 2:21-cv-1701 (N.D. Ala., July 23, 2025)↗A federal court in Oregon ordered a lawyer to pay $109,700 in sanctions and costs for filing AI-generated errors, reported as one of the largest such penalties to date.
Reported by NPR, April 2026↗Damien Charlotin, a researcher at HEC Paris, maintains a public database of court decisions involving AI hallucinations. By April 2026 it had logged more than 1,200 cases, roughly 800 from U.S. courts.
AI Hallucination Cases · damiencharlotin.com↗We are not a drafting tool. We are not an assistant. We sit between whatever tool your firm already uses and the filing your name will appear on, and we make sure the work is defensible.
Every cited authority is matched against primary reporters, statutes, and court rules. We confirm the case exists, that the holding is what counsel says it is, and that the proposition is actually supported.
Every action, by a human, by a model, by a tool, is timestamped, hashed, and bound to the filing. The audit trail is exportable as a signed PDF that travels with the brief.
Stress-test the brief adversarially before opposing counsel does. Surface unsupported propositions, weakened precedent, and authority you may have omitted.
“No brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations, whether provided by generative AI or any other source, that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified.”
Pilots begin with a single practice group and a real matter. Bring a brief. We'll show you what a defensibility report looks like for your own work.