Was Shannon v. Shannon sanctioned over AI-generated citations?

Shannon v. Shannon (Nebraska SC, October 2, 2026) is a documented matter involving citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The recorded outcome was: Brief stricken; review limited to plain error; contempt order affirmed; no monetary sanction for the citations; court warned that dismissal may follow in future cases. No monetary penalty in this order.

Which AI tool was involved in Shannon v. Shannon?

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

October 2, 2026 · AI sanctions database

Shannon v. Shannon

Shannon v. Shannon 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: Nebraska SC
Date: October 2, 2026
Party: Pro Se Litigant
AI tool: Not identified in the order
Outcome: Brief stricken; review limited to plain error; contempt order affirmed; no monetary sanction for the citations; court warned that dismissal may follow in future cases
Penalty: No monetary penalty in this order.

Warning

What the record shows

The Nebraska Supreme Court described a self-represented appellant's brief in a post-divorce contempt appeal as riddled with fabricated citations and quotations, and attributed them to the appellant's admitted use of generative AI; no specific tool was named. Applying Prososki v. Regan to self-represented parties, the court held that a brief with misstatements of law or nonexistent authority is sanctionable whether or not the party has counsel. Citing the novelty of the issue, it stopped short of dismissal, struck the brief, reviewed for plain error, found none, and affirmed. It warned that dismissal may follow in future cases. The $16,114.74 attorney fee award discussed in the opinion arose from the contempt proceeding, not the citations, and is not counted as a penalty here.

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 · Nebraska SC

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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