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Fake AI citations keep reaching courts: what this fall's sanctions and the Tenth Circuit's proposed rule mean for solo lawyers

A tracker now counts 2,202 court decisions on AI-hallucinated content, a Manhattan lawyer was ordered to pay nearly $39,000 to the opposing lawyers who caught his fake citations, and the Tenth Circuit has proposed an AI review rule for 2027. Here is a citation check you can run.

Published 5 min read

By Robert Pasha

Courts keep catching fake citations, and the cost of getting caught keeps going up. This month brought two reminders. A federal judge in Manhattan ordered a lawyer to pay nearly $39,000 to the opposing lawyers who exposed his AI-generated citations. And the Tenth Circuit's comment period closed on a proposed rule aimed at AI-assisted filings.

Most solo lawyers already know AI can invent cases. The useful question is what a reliable check looks like when you are the only lawyer in the office and the brief is due tomorrow.

The numbers are still climbing

Researcher Damien Charlotin keeps a public database of court decisions involving AI-hallucinated content. As of its October 19, 2026 update, it lists 2,202 cases worldwide, 1,501 of them in the United States. The database includes filings by self-represented litigants as well as lawyers.

For scale, Scientific American reported on May 22, 2026 that the same database then held more than 1,400 cases. New decisions had leveled off at roughly 350 to 400 per quarter. That is not a problem going away.

Meanwhile, policy lags practice. Newsweek cited a 2026 survey of more than 1,300 legal professionals: 69% use general-purpose AI for work, but only 9% of firms have a written, enforced AI policy.

What happened in Flycatcher v. Affable Avenue

The Manhattan case shows how a citation problem turns into a case-ending problem. In February, Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York entered a default judgment against the client of attorney Steven Feldman as a "terminal sanction," after repeated filings with false citations, according to the Volokh Conspiracy's February 6 write-up of the opinion.

The court was clear that AI was not the issue. It wrote that its problems with the submissions "are not the use of AI per se." It pointed instead to "his inexplicable refusal to verify his submissions before filing them with the Court." The opinion's simplest line is the one to remember: "If Mr. Feldman could not verify a citation, he should not have cited it."

On October 9, 2026, Law360 reported the follow-up. The judge ordered the attorney to pay nearly $39,000 to the lawyers who uncovered the AI use, noting he had given them the "runaround" when they tried to collect directly.

Other courts have gone further against the lawyers personally. In Withers v. City of Aberdeen, a Mississippi federal civil rights case, a judge sanctioned four lawyers after both sides filed briefs with fake citations. Two were barred from appearing in the district for two years and fined, Newsweek reported.

The Tenth Circuit's proposed rule

The Tenth Circuit, which hears appeals from Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming, has proposed revisions to Rule 46.5. The court's memo says they are "intended to address the increased use of generative artificial intelligence by both lawyers and pro se litigants." Comments were accepted through October 18, 2026. Final rules are to be posted by November 30, 2026, and take effect January 1, 2027.

FindLaw describes the proposal as requiring the filer to certify that a person reviewed AI-assisted work to confirm that cited authorities are real and accurately quoted. Possible consequences would include existing sanctions plus waiver of the affected issue or striking the filing. Treat that description as provisional until the final text is posted.

California is moving the same way. Its new SB 574, signed September 30, 2026, requires the responsible attorney to personally verify every citation in a California court filing starting January 1, 2027, as Holland & Knight summarized.

A citation check a solo lawyer can actually run

Rules like these do not ask for anything new. They make an old duty explicit and easier to enforce. The point is to make verification a fixed step, not a judgment call at 11 p.m.

  1. Pull every authority from a primary source. Open each case, statute, and rule in a reporter, official site, or trusted research service. Do not accept a citation because it looks right.
  2. Read the cited page. Confirm the case says what your brief says it says, at the pin cite you gave.
  3. Match every quotation word for word. Misquoted language from a real case is still a false citation.
  4. Check that the authority is still good law. Run a citator on everything you rely on.
  5. Do not use AI to check AI. An AI tool that confirms a citation exists is not verification. A human reading the source is.
  6. Log it. Keep a short checklist in the file showing who verified the citations and when. If a court asks, you have an answer.

What to do this week

  • Write a one-page AI policy. Cover which tools are allowed, what client information may go into them, and the citation check above. Newsweek quoted one firm's rule that fits on a sticky note: "If it matters, a human checks it."
  • Read your judges' standing orders. Individual judges have their own AI orders, and they differ. One tracker notes that a Northern District of Texas judge's bar on AI-generated text in filings before her took effect September 1, 2026, per Legal AI Governance's April to September 2026 roundup. Check before every new case.
  • Check the other side's citations too. In Flycatcher, opposing counsel found the problem and recovered fees for the work.
  • If you find an error after filing, fix it fast. Notify the court and correct the filing. Courts look closely at how a lawyer responds once a problem surfaces, and in Flycatcher the court found bad faith.
  • Calendar January 1, 2027. That is when both the Tenth Circuit changes and California's SB 574 are set to take effect.

This post is general information, not legal advice; check your state's rules and your court's local rules and standing orders.

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