Was Matthew Lewis v. Eagle County Government sanctioned over AI-generated citations?

Matthew Lewis v. Eagle County Government (D. Colorado, November 14, 2025) is a documented matter involving citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The recorded outcome was: Order to Show Cause made absolute; $3,000 sanction to the court; Section 1927 fees to defense (amount to be determined). $3,000 in monetary penalties.

Which AI tool was involved in Matthew Lewis v. Eagle County Government?

The order in Matthew Lewis v. Eagle County Government does not identify a specific generative tool by name. The court treated the citations as the product of an unverified AI-assisted drafting workflow.

November 14, 2025 · AI sanctions database

Matthew Lewis v. Eagle County Government

Matthew Lewis v. Eagle County Government 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: D. Colorado
Date: November 14, 2025
Party: Lawyer
AI tool: Not identified in the order
Outcome: Order to Show Cause made absolute; $3,000 sanction to the court; Section 1927 fees to defense (amount to be determined)
Penalty: $3,000 in monetary penalties.

FineProfessional sanction

What the record shows

The court made its Order to Show Cause absolute and sanctioned attorney Sara A. Green and her firm after finding the pleadings contained citations to cases the court determined do not exist; counsel repeatedly denied using AI before conceding a citation was fictitious. The court imposed a $3,000 sanction on Green and the firm, jointly and severally, payable to the court, and separately found an award of reasonable attorney's fees to defense counsel under 28 U.S.C. Section 1927 appropriate, directing the parties to confer on that amount.

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 ↗

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 · D. Colorado

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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