Cases › made things up › LR-2026-0477
Judge fines and sanctions two city lawyers over AI-generated citations
Preliminary Why: Publisher not yet named · subject to change
Status: action reported, no fix
No source states: loss or records, agent tool, could do, deployer, industry.
Severity minor: Test: contained to one deployer (the city Law Department) with no third party touched; the sources state fines and resignations, not any wider effect.
A law department in the City of New Orleans used ChatGPT to help research a motion in a federal civil rights lawsuit. The filing included nine made-up case citations generated by AI, and the attorney said he did not check whether the cases were real before adding them to the brief. A supervising deputy city attorney reviewed the motion before filing but did not question the strange formatting of the fake citations. The federal judge found the citations during the case and ordered the attorneys to appear in court. At a March 19 hearing one attorney admitted the AI use. The court ruled that the filing violated Rule 11, imposed fines of $250 and $1,000, and issued a formal warning to a third official. Both attorneys resigned, and the office adopted a written AI policy effective March 27, 2026.
What happened
What was done
Risks
Read from the sources; not yet reviewed by a person.
Controls
Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:
ApplicationGrounding and fact checks · Human approval for high-impact actions · Output filtering and redaction · People told they are dealing with AI
Similar incidents
Evidence
- Cause a human check that existed was skipped or failed
No source states: what the AI was doing, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, what set it off.
Show the full account: 3 items from the primary sources
What happened, in order
- 2026-01 Motion containing the false citations was filed in the Gentry lawsuit.
- 2026-03-19 At a hearing, Harris admitted he used ChatGPT to help research the motion.
- 2026-03-27 The City Attorney's Law Department AI policy took effect.
Show every field, with its source and grade
The AI system
What happened
Impact
Context
Notes on gaps
The exact date of the resignations is not stated. The supervisor's failed review and the missing check by the attorney are not clearly mapped to a listed control; I7 is used for the missing verification and the supervisory review is not coded. The summary describes the third official's warning as formal, as the source states, and characterises the supervisor's review neutrally.
LR-2026-0477 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON