A Massachusetts court sanctioned counsel $2,000 over three filings with AI-fabricated citations
In Smith v. Farwell (Civil Action No. 2282CV01197), the Suffolk Superior Court of Massachusetts ordered plaintiff counsel to pay a $2,000 sanction after three opposition pleadings contained fictitious case citations generated by an AI system. An associate attorney and two recent law graduates used an unidentified AI to draft the filings, and the supervising attorney reviewed them only for style and grammar without verifying the citations. Justice Brian A. Davis found a knowing failure to review under Mass. R. Civ. P. 11 and imposed the sanction on February 12, 2024.
A generative AI system fabricated nonexistent case citations and the supervising attorney filed them without any verification, proving that no inquiry is not a reasonable inquiry.
Key facts
- What
- In Smith v.
- Incident date
- Feb 12, 2024
- Who
- Law Office of Jae S. Lee
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Copilot
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
In the wrongful death case Smith v. Farwell (No. 2282CV01197), an associate attorney used an unidentified AI system to draft three opposition pleadings that included citations to nonexistent cases. The supervising attorney reviewed the filings only for style and grammar, not for the accuracy of the case citations. The court discovered the fictitious citations at oral argument on the motions to dismiss and held a sanctions hearing on December 7, 2023. On February 12, 2024, Justice Brian A. Davis imposed a $2,000 sanction under Mass. R. Civ. P. 11, characterizing it as a mild sanction given the seriousness of the violation.
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.
A generative AI system produced fabricated case citations that appeared plausible but referenced decisions that do not exist in reality. The supervising attorney failed to verify any of the AI-generated legal authority before filing, reviewing the documents only for style and grammar. The court found that no inquiry into the accuracy of citations is not a reasonable inquiry, constituting a violation of Rule 11.
What it cost
Sources
- Court FilingSmith v. Farwell (Court Opinion, Lawyers Weekly No. 12-007-24)masslawyersweekly.com
- PressMassachusetts Lawyer Sanctioned for AI-Generated Fictitious Case Citationsmsba.org
- PressArtificial Intelligence A.I.n't the answerfmglaw.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/massachusetts-court-sanctioned-counsel-2-000AI Failure Index. "A Massachusetts court sanctioned counsel $2,000 over three filings with AI-fabricated citations" (FI-0120). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/massachusetts-court-sanctioned-counsel-2-000 (indexed Jun 4, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0120. 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.