Was Shahid v. Esaam sanctioned over AI-generated citations?

Shahid v. Esaam (Georgia CA, June 30, 2025) is a documented matter involving citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The recorded outcome was: Frivolous-motion penalty: $2,500; order vacated and remanded. $2,500 in monetary penalties.

Which AI tool was involved in Shahid v. Esaam?

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

June 30, 2025 · AI sanctions database

Shahid v. Esaam

Shahid v. Esaam 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: Georgia CA
Date: June 30, 2025
Party: Lawyer
AI tool: Not identified in the order
Outcome: Frivolous-motion penalty: $2,500; order vacated and remanded
Penalty: $2,500 in monetary penalties.

Fine

What the record shows

The Court of Appeals of Georgia vacated and remanded a divorce order that had relied on non-existent case law, and found that the appellee's brief, apparently prepared with AI, cited numerous cases that are either hallucinated or unrelated to the propositions asserted. The court imposed a $2,500 frivolous-motion penalty on the appellee's attorney, Diana Lynch, the maximum allowed under Court of Appeals Rule 7(e)(2), because the brief supported a frivolous request for attorney's fees.

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 · Georgia CA

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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