Zachariah Crabill suspended for AI-generated hallucinated case law
Attorney Zachariah Crabill was sanctioned by the Colorado bar for submitting a court filing with fake case law generated by ChatGPT. This resulted in a 90-day disciplinary suspension.
The attorney relied on AI generated citations that appeared authentic but were entirely fabricated.
Key facts
- What
- Attorney Zachariah Crabill was sanctioned by the Colorado bar for submitting a court filing with fake case law generated by ChatGPT.
- Incident date
- Nov 22, 2023
- Who
- Zachariah Crabill
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- High
What happened
Colorado attorney Zachariah Crabill filed a legal motion containing fabricated case citations generated by ChatGPT. He did not verify the accuracy of the AI-generated content before submitting it to the court. As a result, he received disciplinary sanctions, including a 90-day suspension and a 366-day suspension with the remainder stayed upon probation.
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 LLM produced plausible-looking but non-existent citations by predicting text patterns instead of retrieving factual records. The attorney’s lack of independent verification before filing allowed the fabrications to reach the court record.
What it cost
Sources
- Court FilingCrabill, Stipulation to Discipline, 23PDJ067, 11-22-23coloradolegalregulation.com
- PressColo. Atty Suspended For Using 'Sham' ChatGPT Case Lawlaw360.com
- Press90-day suspension of Colorado lawyer who filed ChatGPT-written motion with hallucinated casesreason.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/zachariah-crabill-suspended-generated-hallucinated-lawAI Failure Index. "Zachariah Crabill suspended for AI-generated hallucinated case law" (FI-0264). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/zachariah-crabill-suspended-generated-hallucinated-law (indexed Jun 5, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0264. 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.