AI Citation Sanctions Roundup, Week 1: What Seven Courts Did Between August 27 and September 8, 2026
Short answer: the largest AI citation sanction entered in the United States this week was $8,000, imposed on plaintiff’s counsel in Booker v. The Kroger Co., No. 1:26-cv-02006-SDG (N.D. Ga. Aug. 28, 2026). Six other courts addressed fabricated or unsupported citations between August 27 and September 8, 2026. Four imposed nothing.
This is the first weekly roundup. It covers United States entries in the AI Hallucination Cases database as of its 10 September 2026 update, decided August 27 through September 8, 2026. Every order below was read twice in full. What could not be is not here, and the gaps are named at the end.
How many AI hallucination cases are in the database now?
As of the 10 September 2026 update the database lists 2,036 entries, 1,393 of them from the United States, and by party type 1,172 pro se litigants, 809 lawyers, 32 judges, 15 experts, 5 prosecutors and 2 paralegals. When we published the sanctions record on September 7, it stood at 2,022 entries, 1,379 from the United States, with 805 lawyer and 1,163 pro se entries. The week added 14, all United States matters: four lawyer, nine pro se, one judge. The counters are separate cuts and do not cross-tabulate, so no combined figure is stated. Pro se filings drive volume; lawyer filings drive money.
The $8,000 order: Booker v. The Kroger Co. (N.D. Ga.)
Judge Steven D. Grimberg issued the week’s only substantial monetary sanction, and it does not turn on the fake citations alone. It turns on what counsel said afterward: “The Court finds that counsel for Plaintiff, repeatedly, has lied to the Court.” The order to show cause had identified four purported cases that “represented the most egregious examples of fake, false, and misleading case authorities.” At the hearing, counsel stated, “I did not use artificial intelligence.”
The arithmetic is explicit: $1,000 for each of the four fake authorities, doubled for the misrepresentations. Total $8,000 to the registry of the Court within 30 days, plus documentation within 7 days of the ethics and technology CLE counsel had enrolled in and completed. The multiplier attached to the candor failure, not the research failure.
Striking the brief instead of fining the lawyer: Douglas v. Deutsche Bank (D.C.)
In Barry Douglas v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co., No. 24-CV-1099 (D.C. Sept. 3, 2026), Associate Judges Easterly and Shanker and Senior Judge Glickman took a different route. Counsel for the appellee, Loishirl W. Hall of McCabe, Weisberg & Conway, LLC, “confirmed that four of the brief’s cited authorities did not exist.” The opinion names them: Abadie v. District of Columbia, Cason v. Nat’l Consumer Co-op Bank, Osborne v. District of Columbia, and Woods v. United States. Hall had used Google’s generative artificial intelligence search tool and had not verified the results.
No money changed hands. The court struck the appellee’s brief in its entirety and referred the matter to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, rejecting the firm’s proposal to redact the bad citations because that “would constitute effectively no sanction at all.” Losing the brief is worse than paying $8,000, and the referral is worse than both.
$1,750 and a deliberate refusal to discipline: the Missouri writ
In State ex rel. Steven Schnell v. Honorable Rebecca Richardson, No. ED114731 (Mo. Ct. App., E.D., Writ Div. Four, filed Sept. 8, 2026), relator’s counsel Jenna Rohr Conley “cited two cases that she now admits do not exist.” The court described the failure mode precisely: “The citations did not correspond to the cases cited. And the cases at the cited locations did not involve the subject matter at issue.” Counsel’s response to the show cause order stated that she used generative artificial intelligence to research authorities and failed to verify the citations before filing.
The court awarded $1,750 in attorney’s fees to the real parties in interest, then drew a line worth reading before assuming a sanctions order equals a bar problem: “This Court makes no decision regarding whether Conley’s conduct violated any rule. That determination, and whether any violation warrants discipline, rests solely in the discretion of the Supreme Court of Missouri.” Sanctions, discipline and malpractice are three exposures with three decision-makers. This order resolves one and expressly declines another.
The California order with no sanction, which is the one to read
Falkenstein v. Niles, No. 2:26-cv-07078-SB-PD (C.D. Cal. Sept. 3, 2026), is the most instructive order of the week for California practitioners, and nobody was sanctioned. Judge Stanley Blumenfeld, Jr. directed defense counsel Ashley D. Posner to be prepared at the hearing to address six citation problems, among them a successor-liability proposition attributed to Cumulus Media that the court “has not located” in the decision, quotations attributed to Herb Reed Enterprises and Oakland Tribune that “do not appear in the actual decision,” and a quotation mark placed around the word “engaged” in a characterization of the complaint where the complaint did not use it.
The certification history is the point. Counsel certified that no portion of the motion to dismiss was generated using generative artificial intelligence. For the reply and the preliminary-injunction opposition, counsel disclosed AI use for sorting evidence, identifying arguments and drafting portions, while certifying personal verification of the authorities. The errors appear across all three. The court was careful: “The Court has not determined that counsel violated Rule 11, the Court’s Standing Order, or any other obligation.” A standing-order certification is a representation about process, and it does not survive a document containing quotations the opinions do not contain.
New York and Minnesota: warnings, and one award against a pro se appellant
Both New York entries involve pro se plaintiffs and neither produced a sanction. In Philippeaux v. United States, No. 24-cv-8732 (MKV) (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 8, 2026), Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil flagged filings that “cited in them to apparently non-existent cases,” giving two reporter citations as examples. No sanction, no order to show cause, no referral. In Carter v. City of Buffalo, No. 25-CV-740 (JLS) (MJR) (W.D.N.Y. Sept. 8, 2026), Judge John L. Sinatra, Jr. wrote in footnote 5 that “repeated misuse of artificial intelligence undermines the genuine role it may ultimately have in contributing to the cause of justice,” and, given the plaintiff’s “continued use of case law that does not support the propositions she asserts,” concluded that “artificial intelligence may have been used to prepare the amended complaint.” The operative sentence: “Carter is warned that any misuse of artificial intelligence in future submissions to the Court may result in sanctions.”
Minnesota supplied the week’s other award. In Asiedu v. Eastlund, Nos. A25-2106 and A26-0532 (Minn. Ct. App. filed Sept. 8, 2026), a self-represented appellant was ordered to pay $2,341.25 in respondents’ costs and attorney fees. The court found that “Asiedu repeatedly misrepresented caselaw, either by citing a case for the wrong legal principle or citing non-existent cases,” and that he “admitted that he used artificial intelligence as a research tool to draft his filings and did not ensure the accuracy of the caselaw citations on the basis that he was ‘doing this part time.'” The opinion is “nonprecedential except as provided by Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c).”
This week’s orders at a glance
| Case and date | Court | Who filed it | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booker v. The Kroger Co., No. 1:26-cv-02006-SDG (Aug. 28, 2026) | N.D. Ga., Atlanta Div. (Grimberg, J.) | Plaintiff’s counsel | $8,000 to the court registry within 30 days; CLE documentation within 7 days |
| Adams v. Matrix Providers, Inc. (Aug. 27, 2026) | D. Colo. | Not stated here | $1,000 per the database entry; order not opened this run, so no detail is stated |
| Douglas v. Deutsche Bank Nat’l Trust Co., No. 24-CV-1099 (Sept. 3, 2026) | D.C. Court of Appeals (Easterly, Shanker, JJ.; Glickman, Sr. J.) | Appellee’s counsel | Brief stricken; referral to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel; no monetary sanction |
| Falkenstein v. Niles, No. 2:26-cv-07078-SB-PD (Sept. 3, 2026) | C.D. Cal. (Blumenfeld, J.) | Defense counsel | Six citation issues set for the hearing; no violation determined; no sanction |
| State ex rel. Schnell v. Richardson, No. ED114731 (Sept. 8, 2026) | Mo. Ct. App., E.D., Writ Div. Four | Relator’s counsel | $1,750 in attorney’s fees to the real parties in interest; discipline expressly left to the Supreme Court of Missouri |
| Asiedu v. Eastlund, Nos. A25-2106, A26-0532 (Sept. 8, 2026) | Minn. Ct. App. (Ross, P.J.; Larson, Beane, JJ.) | Self-represented appellant | $2,341.25 in respondents’ costs and attorney fees |
| Philippeaux v. United States, No. 24-cv-8732 (MKV) (Sept. 8, 2026) | S.D.N.Y. (Vyskocil, J.) | Pro se plaintiff | Non-existent cases noted; no sanction, no order to show cause, no referral |
| Carter v. City of Buffalo, No. 25-CV-740 (JLS) (MJR) (Sept. 8, 2026) | W.D.N.Y. (Sinatra, J.) | Pro se plaintiff | Express warning that future misuse “may result in sanctions”; no sanction |
Rule table: the operative language behind these orders
| Authority | Exact operative language | Read at |
|---|---|---|
| Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b)(2) | “the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law” | law.cornell.edu |
| Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(c)(2) | “The motion must be served under Rule 5, but it must not be filed or be presented to the court if the challenged paper, claim, defense, contention, or denial is withdrawn or appropriately corrected within 21 days after service or within another time the court sets.” | law.cornell.edu |
| Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(c)(3) | “On its own, the court may order an attorney, law firm, or party to show cause why conduct specifically described in the order has not violated Rule 11(b).” | law.cornell.edu |
| Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(c)(4) | “A sanction imposed under this rule must be limited to what suffices to deter repetition of the conduct or comparable conduct by others similarly situated. The sanction may include nonmonetary directives; an order to pay a penalty into court; or, if imposed on motion and warranted for effective deterrence, an order directing payment to the movant of part or all of the reasonable attorney’s fees and other expenses directly resulting from the violation.” | law.cornell.edu |
| Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 128.7(b)(2) | “The claims, defenses, and other legal contentions therein are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law or the establishment of new law.” | california.public.law and codes.findlaw.com, agreeing |
| Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 128.7(c)(2) | “On its own motion, the court may enter an order describing the specific conduct that appears to violate subdivision (b) and directing an attorney, law firm, or party to show cause why it has not violated subdivision (b), unless, within 21 days of service of the order to show cause, the challenged paper, claim, defense, contention, allegation, or denial is withdrawn or appropriately corrected.” | california.public.law and codes.findlaw.com, agreeing |
| 22 NYCRR 130-1.1(c)(1) | conduct is frivolous if “it is completely without merit in law and cannot be supported by a reasonable argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law” | law.cornell.edu |
| 22 NYCRR 130-1.2 | “In no event shall the amount of sanctions imposed exceed $10,000 for any single occurrence of frivolous conduct.” The court may act “only upon a written decision setting forth the conduct on which the award or imposition is based, the reasons why the court found the conduct to be frivolous, and the reasons why the court found the amount awarded or imposed to be appropriate.” | law.cornell.edu |
Cross-jurisdiction contrast: what a court-initiated order to show cause actually gives you
This divergence set the posture in most of this week’s orders, verified today in all three systems.
Federal. Rule 11(c)(2)’s 21-day withdrawal window applies to a sanctions motion. Rule 11(c)(3) has no equivalent, so when a federal court issues its own order to show cause, correcting the paper does not close the door. Booker, Falkenstein, Philippeaux and Carter all arose on the court’s own initiative.
California. Section 128.7(c)(2) differs from its federal counterpart on exactly this point. The California court-initiated order to show cause applies “unless, within 21 days of service of the order to show cause, the challenged paper, claim, defense, contention, allegation, or denial is withdrawn or appropriately corrected.” California gives a correction window on the court’s own order that Rule 11(c)(3) does not. Moving between the Central District and a superior court, that is not a detail to carry over by memory.
New York. Part 130 has no safe harbor at all. It has a ceiling instead: sanctions may not exceed $10,000 for any single occurrence, and the court must issue a written decision identifying the conduct, why it was frivolous, and why the amount is appropriate. A New York cap, a California correction window, and a federal system with neither.
Worked example: pricing the Kroger order against your own brief
Run the Booker arithmetic against a brief you are about to file. Four fabricated authorities at $1,000 each is $4,000, doubled for the misrepresentations is $8,000, payable to the court registry within 30 days, so on that timeline the money is gone by roughly September 27, 2026, and none of it is recoverable from the client. Add the 7-day CLE deadline, the hearing time and the write-off on the underlying motion.
Now price verification. Pulling four cited authorities and confirming the reporter cite, pin cite, proposition and subsequent history takes an experienced reader about fifteen minutes each, one hour for the four. At a $400 blended rate that is $400 of unbilled time against an $8,000 penalty, a disciplinary exposure and a hearing at which counsel must explain a prior statement to the court. Twenty to one, before reputation. The same arithmetic ran on the appellate side in Noland v. Land of the Free, where the California Court of Appeal imposed $10,000 and declined to award anything to opposing counsel who had not caught the fabrications.
Drafting-ready text: the verification certification and the response to an order to show cause
Two blocks. The first is a declaration to attach where a standing order requires certification. The second opens a response to a court-initiated order to show cause, for the posture where the citation is in fact bad.
DECLARATION OF COUNSEL RE: VERIFICATION OF CITED AUTHORITIES
I, [NAME], declare:
1. I am an attorney licensed to practice before this Court and counsel of
record for [PARTY]. I make this declaration of my own personal knowledge
and, if called as a witness, could and would testify competently to it.
2. Before this [pleading/motion/brief] was filed, I personally retrieved the
full text of every judicial decision, statute, rule and regulation cited
in it from [Westlaw/Lexis/the issuing court's own website], and I read the
portion of each authority that is cited.
3. For each authority I confirmed, individually: (a) that the authority
exists; (b) that the reporter citation and pin cite are accurate;
(c) that the quoted language appears verbatim at the page cited;
(d) that the authority states the proposition for which it is cited; and
(e) that I checked its subsequent history and found it has not been
reversed, vacated, overruled or superseded as to that proposition.
4. [If the court's standing order requires an AI disclosure:] Generative
artificial intelligence was [not used in the preparation of this document]
[used for the following limited purposes: ________]. No citation in this
document was taken from a generative artificial intelligence output
without the independent verification described in paragraph 3.
5. I retain a verification log identifying each authority, the database or
site from which the full text was retrieved, and the date of retrieval.
I will produce it to the Court on request.
I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of [the State of
California / the United States of America] that the foregoing is true and
correct. Executed on [DATE] at [CITY, STATE].
_____________________________
[NAME]RESPONSE TO ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE
[PARTY] responds to the Court's Order to Show Cause dated [DATE] as follows.
1. Counsel does not dispute the Court's finding. The citation to
[CASE NAME AND CITE] at page [X], line [Y] of the [DOCUMENT] does not
support the proposition for which it was offered. [If applicable:] The
decision as cited does not exist.
2. Counsel takes personal responsibility. The error was counsel's. It was
not the client's, and the client had no knowledge of it.
3. How it happened, without qualification: [FACTUAL ACCOUNT, INCLUDING
WHETHER A GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOL WAS USED, WHICH TOOL,
FOR WHICH TASK, AND WHAT VERIFICATION STEP WAS OMITTED].
4. Corrective action already taken: [WITHDRAWAL OR CORRECTED FILING, DATE];
[NOTICE TO OPPOSING COUNSEL, DATE]; [NOTICE TO CLIENT, DATE];
[AUDIT OF ALL OTHER PENDING FILINGS BY THIS OFFICE, DATE COMPLETED,
RESULT]; [WRITTEN VERIFICATION PROTOCOL ADOPTED, DATE, ATTACHED AS
EXHIBIT __]; [CLE ENROLLED IN OR COMPLETED, DATES, ATTACHED].
5. Counsel has made no statement to this Court, at any hearing or in any
filing, inconsistent with paragraphs 1 through 4.
Respectfully submitted,Paragraph 5 exists because of Booker, where the multiplier attached to what was said after the error, not to the error.
Pre-filing checklist
- Pull the full text of every cited authority. A citator entry is not the opinion.
- Confirm the reporter citation and pin cite page for every quotation. Falkenstein turned partly on quoted language that does not appear in the decisions.
- Confirm the authority states the proposition. In Schnell the citations did not correspond to the cases, and the cases at the cited locations were off subject.
- Check subsequent history for every authority, not just the lead cases.
- Verify quotation marks around record language too. One Falkenstein issue was a quotation mark around a word the complaint did not use.
- Read the judge’s standing order before certifying anything. Falkenstein involved a standing-order certification, not a Rule 11 signature.
- Audit the brief you receive, not only the one you send. That duty is published law in California.
- Keep a verification log: authority, source, retriever, date. It is what you attach if an order to show cause issues.
- If you find a bad cite after filing, correct it before the court does, and never describe your process in terms you cannot document.
Citation verification before the brief goes out
LegalBriefsUSA runs human citation verification on the briefs and oppositions you file and on the briefs you receive. Every authority is pulled in full text, the pin cite and quotation are checked against the page, the proposition is confirmed and subsequent history is run, and you get back a verification log in the form above, ready to attach to a declaration or a response to an order to show cause. If you are holding a reply brief this week with authorities you have not personally read, that is the document to send us.
The same discipline runs through our California appellate brief drafting and our motion work, where the CCP 1005 court-day count leaves less verification time than anyone plans for.
Authorities cited
Seven court orders were opened and read in full, twice each, with a second read using a different extraction prompt, and the two reads agreed on every figure, date, case number and quoted sentence reported above: Booker v. The Kroger Co., No. 1:26-cv-02006-SDG (N.D. Ga. Aug. 28, 2026); Douglas v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co., No. 24-CV-1099 (D.C. Sept. 3, 2026); Falkenstein v. Niles, No. 2:26-cv-07078-SB-PD (C.D. Cal. Sept. 3, 2026); State ex rel. Schnell v. Richardson, No. ED114731 (Mo. Ct. App., E.D. Sept. 8, 2026); Asiedu v. Eastlund, Nos. A25-2106, A26-0532 (Minn. Ct. App. Sept. 8, 2026); Philippeaux v. United States, No. 24-cv-8732 (MKV) (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 8, 2026); and Carter v. City of Buffalo, No. 25-CV-740 (JLS) (MJR) (W.D.N.Y. Sept. 8, 2026). Each order was read as the court’s own signed document, mirrored in the document library of the AI Hallucination Cases database, whose tabulated penalty amounts independently match the amounts stated in the orders. The Douglas outcome is additionally corroborated by Eugene Volokh’s report of September 4, 2026, which agrees on the court, the date, the four nonexistent authorities, the striking of the brief and the disciplinary referral. Database counts were read at damiencharlotin.com on September 11, 2026, reflecting its 10 September 2026 update; the September 5 comparison figures come from our own September 7 sanctions record. Rule text: Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b), (b)(2), (c)(1), (c)(2), (c)(3), (c)(4), and 22 NYCRR 130-1.1(a), (b), (c) and 130-1.2, all at law.cornell.edu; Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 128.7(b), (b)(2), (c)(1), (c)(2) read independently at california.public.law and at codes.findlaw.com, both agreeing on the operative language. Left out for lack of verification: the D. Colo. order in Adams v. Matrix Providers, Inc. was not opened this run, so only the database’s $1,000 figure is reported and no holding is stated; Mo. R. Civ. P. 55.03(b)(2) and Minn. R. Civ. P. 11.02(b) are reported only as quoted inside the opinions, not from an independent Missouri or Minnesota source; the Minnesota decision cited an inherent-authority precedent that was not opened, so it is not named or relied on here; the decisions the Falkenstein court identified as misquoted are named only as the court described them and were not independently read, so nothing is stated about what they actually hold; no independent press report was located for Booker, Falkenstein, Schnell, Asiedu, Philippeaux or Carter, and no copy of those orders was located on the issuing courts’ own websites, so each rests on two readings of the order document itself plus the database’s independent penalty tabulation; no disciplinary disposition is reported for any lawyer named above, because none was opened; and the CourtListener connector was unavailable on this run, so no docket was consulted.
LegalBriefsUSA.com provides drafting and research support to licensed attorneys and law firms. This article is written for attorneys, is not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.