The Doc App counsel files fabricated case law in Florida court
A lawyer representing The Doc App, Inc. used AI to generate court filings that included fake case law. The court flagged the hallucinations and previously sanctioned the attorney, though it declined further sanctions in June 2026.
The court attributed the failure to the attorney's lack of review of AI-generated material.
Key facts
- What
- A lawyer representing The Doc App, Inc.
- Incident date
- Jun 9, 2026
- Who
- The Doc App, Inc.
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
Counsel for The Doc App, Inc., Jason Castro, submitted court filings containing fabricated and misrepresented case law. The court found that the documents were generated by AI and not properly reviewed by the attorney. On June 9, 2026, the court declined to impose additional sanctions, noting that previous sanctions were already in place.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user asks for a fact, a citation, or a figure.
- 02 · Model stepThe model writes a fluent, confident answer.
- 03 · Control gapNothing ties the claim back to a real source.
- 04 · FailureA fabricated fact ships as if it were verified.
- 05 · ConsequenceThe false claim reaches a customer, a court, or the public.
Confidence holds, and even spikes, as the claim detaches from any source.
The AI model hallucinated nonexistent legal citations and misrepresented existing case law. The failure was caused by the attorney's failure to verify the AI-generated content before submission.
What it cost
Sources
- Court FilingLeafwell, Inc. v. The Doc App, Inc., No. 2:2025cv01132 - Justia Lawlaw.justia.com
- PressAI Hallucination Cases Database - Damien Charlotindamiencharlotin.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/doc-counsel-files-fabricated-law-floridaAI Failure Index. "The Doc App counsel files fabricated case law in Florida court" (FI-0592). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/doc-counsel-files-fabricated-law-florida (indexed Jun 16, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0592. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
A runtime layer that watches the model's internal state can flag the moment a model commits to a claim it has no support for, and hold or reroute the response before it reaches a user. Realm reads those signals in real time rather than grading the transcript after the fact.