Was Mata v. Avianca, Inc. sanctioned over AI-generated citations?

Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D. New York, June 22, 2023) is a documented matter involving citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The recorded outcome was: Monetary penalty: $5,000, imposed jointly and severally on counsel and their firm under Rule 11. $5,000 in monetary penalties.

Which AI tool was involved in Mata v. Avianca, Inc.?

The matter records ChatGPT as the generative tool associated with the unverified citations in Mata v. Avianca, Inc..

June 22, 2023 · AI sanctions database

Mata v. Avianca, Inc.

Mata v. Avianca, Inc. is one matter in the Veritas record of US court proceedings involving AI-generated citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The summary below is drawn from the underlying court document, linked at the foot of this page.

Court: S.D. New York
Date: June 22, 2023
Party: Lawyer
AI tool: ChatGPT
Outcome: Monetary penalty: $5,000, imposed jointly and severally on counsel and their firm under Rule 11
Penalty: $5,000 in monetary penalties.

Fine

What the record shows

In this foundational matter, the court found that attorneys Steven A. Schwartz and Peter LoDuca and their firm, Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, P.C., submitted an opposition brief citing six judicial opinions that the court determined did not exist and could not be located in any reporter. The court recorded that the cited decisions, along with their quotations and internal citations, had been produced by the generative AI tool ChatGPT and were nonexistent. Acting under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, the court imposed a $5,000 penalty payable into the Registry of the Court, held the firm jointly responsible for the violation, and directed counsel to notify the plaintiff and each judge falsely named as an author of the fabricated opinions.

This entry reflects the court document as filed. The citations at issue could not be located in the reporters named at the time of the order. The reading here is descriptive of the public record and is not legal advice.

Source documents

Primary court document ↗ · CourtListener record ↗

The test this filing did not run

Every matter in this record shares one mechanism: a citation that did not resolve to an opinion in the reporter named, in a brief that was filed before any verification step ran. Veritas runs that step. The Filing Risk Scanner extracts each citation, resolves it against reporter and public-record sources, and returns a verdict on each one — located, partial, or not located in reporter — before the brief is signed.

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Filed under · AI sanctions database · S.D. New York

About this publication

Veritas is a pre-filing citation verification platform for law firms and in-house counsel. Every post on the audit log is written by the Veritas editorial team and cross-checked against the underlying sanctions order, standing order, or published opinion it references. Reporter citations are read in their named volumes. Quotations from court orders are checked against the docket.

The product was built by Andrew Zoll, founder of Veritas, who tracks generative AI sanctions in federal and state courts and turns each documented failure mode into verification logic the scanner runs. Veritas was built after the canonical Mata v. Avianca sanctions order made the verification gap a published failure mode of the bar.

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