Oregon attorneys fined $110,000 for AI-generated fake case law
A federal judge in Oregon dismissed a vineyard inheritance lawsuit and imposed $110,000 in sanctions against two attorneys for submitting AI-generated briefs containing fabricated citations, with the case dismissed with prejudice.
Rather than a correction, Mr. Brigandi attempted a cover-up.
Key facts
- What
- A federal judge in Oregon dismissed a vineyard inheritance lawsuit and imposed $110,000 in sanctions against two attorneys for submitting AI-generated briefs containing fabricated citations, with the case dismissed with prejudice.
- Incident date
- Dec 12, 2025
- Who
- Stephen Brigandi and Tim Murphy
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Search / RAG
- Severity
- Catastrophic
What happened
Attorneys submitted AI-generated briefs containing non-existent legal citations in a vineyard inheritance dispute. The court dismissed the case with prejudice and sanctioned the attorneys $110,000 in fines and fees. The court noted that one attorney attempted to cover up the errors after they were flagged by opposing counsel.
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 generative AI tool produced fictional legal citations and case law that were not verified by the attorneys before submission. The failure was compounded by insufficient human oversight and a term to amend filings without correcting the hallucinations.
What it cost
Sources
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/oregon-attorneys-fined-110-000-generatedAI Failure Index. "Oregon attorneys fined $110,000 for AI-generated fake case law" (FI-0277). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/oregon-attorneys-fined-110-000-generated (indexed Jun 5, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0277. 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.