Maren Bam sanctioned for AI-generated hallucinations in federal case
Attorney Bam submitted a brief containing AI-hallucinated citations; a federal judge sanctioned Bam, striking the Opening Brief and revoking her pro hac vice status.
Well over the majority of the citations provided to this Court in Plaintiff’s Opening Brief were fabricated, misleading, or unsupported.
Key facts
- What
- Attorney Bam submitted a brief containing AI-hallucinated citations; a federal judge sanctioned Bam, striking the Opening Brief and revoking her pro hac vice status.
- Incident date
- May 27, 2025
- Who
- Salus Disability
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Copilot
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
In the case of Mavy v. Commissioner of SSA, Bam filed an Opening Brief where 12 of 19 cited cases were fabricated, misleading, or unsupported. U.S. District Judge Alison Bachus revoked Bam's pro hac vice status, removed her as counsel of record, and ordered the Clerk to notify the Washington State Bar Association.
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 attorney used a generative AI tool to identify legal precedents but failed to verify the results. The AI hallucinated plausible-sounding case names, citation numbers, and the names of actual judges to create fictitious legal authority.
What it cost
Sources
- PressAs more lawyers fall for AI hallucinations, ChatGPT says: Check my workcronkitenews.azpbs.org
- Court FilingORDER finding Counsel Maren Bam has violated Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and imposing sanctionsdocs.justia.com
- Reader-SubmittedAnother Week, Another AI Hallucination Sanction - With a Twisttechnologylaw.fkks.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/maren-bam-sanctioned-generated-hallucinations-federalAI Failure Index. "Maren Bam sanctioned for AI-generated hallucinations in federal case" (FI-0265). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/maren-bam-sanctioned-generated-hallucinations-federal (indexed Jun 5, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0265. 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.