When the judge cites a case that does not exist

Most of what gets written about AI sanctions is about the lawyer who filed the bad brief. This one is about the other side of the bench.

Judges are in the database too

The public tracker of AI-fabrication matters lists 32 involving judges. That is a small number against the lawyer count, but each one matters more, because a court order carries authority a brief does not.

Shahid v. Esaam (Ga. Ct. App., June 2025). A trial court order relied on fabricated cases. The order was a proposed order drafted by counsel, and the trial court signed it. The appellate court called it void on its face, vacated it and sent the divorce case back, and penalized the attorney who filed the fictitious citations $2,500. A court that adopts a lawyer's draft adopts the lawyer's mistakes, and the parties live with the order until someone catches it.

Federal judges. In 2025 two federal district judges, Judge Neals in New Jersey and Judge Wingate in Mississippi, issued orders with serious errors. After Senator Grassley, the Senate Judiciary chair, wrote to them in October 2025, Judge Neals said an intern used AI without authorization and Judge Wingate said a law clerk used it as a drafting aid. Both pointed to a lapse in human oversight.

Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch. On October 22, 2026 the Fifth Circuit vacated an injunction against a Mississippi statute and ordered the case reassigned to a different judge. As reported, the original order named plaintiffs who did not exist and quoted statutory language that was not in the statute, and a replacement order still cited a case that does not exist. The practical lesson is the one that matters: a defective order does not stay where it is. It gets appealed, vacated, and the case starts over. Your client pays for that.

The courts are responding on their own side. California Rule of Court 10.430 took effect on September 1, 2025 and required California courts that permit AI use to adopt a policy by December 15, 2025. The policy has to bar putting confidential information into public AI tools and require reasonable steps to verify accuracy.

What it means for the lawyer receiving it

Two things changed for the lawyer on the receiving end.

You cannot assume the other side's brief is real. Self-represented litigants account for more than half the matters in the tracker. But lawyers filed hundreds of them. If opposing counsel cites a case that is central to the argument and you do not pull it, you may be the only person in the room who could have caught it.

You cannot assume a court's order is safe to build on. Before you rely on an order's reasoning in a brief, or defend it on appeal, check the authority it cites. That sounds paranoid. In 2026 it is just diligence.

Catching it is also a duty and an opportunity. Raising a fabricated citation early, with a clean record, is a legitimate way to protect your client and the integrity of the proceeding. Raising it late, or after relying on it, is a mess.

Checking incoming authority is the same problem as checking your own

The question is the same in both directions: does this authority exist, is it still good law, and does it say what it is cited for?

That is the validation JILL applies to its own output. Citations are checked against authoritative case databases for the jurisdiction before they appear in a draft, and paragraphs carry a confidence score tied to the strength of the underlying authority. The discipline you want when reading an opposing brief is the discipline JILL enforces when it writes yours: nothing gets treated as real until it has been checked.

Because the work lives inside the matter, the research on the other side's citations stays with the matter and the record of what you checked stays in the audit log. If you later tell a court that a cited case does not exist, you can show how you established that.

A short checklist

• Pull every authority that carries weight in an opposing brief. Not a sample.
• Do the same for any court order you plan to rely on or defend.
• Keep a record of what you checked and when.
• Raise problems promptly and factually. Do not editorialize.
• Assume your own team's drafts get the same treatment.

The profession built a lot of trust around the idea that cited authority was real. That assumption is gone. Replace it with a process.

See how JILL validates citations →