The Play — Issue #21: The Fix Never Reached the Template

On January 20, a lawyer told a federal court in Illinois that he had put corrective measures in place after AI gave him fake citations. On January 27 he filed a motion carrying fake citations he had already filed once, in Wisconsin, three months earlier. Whatever he fixed, it wasn't the template.

On January 14, a judge in the Northern District of Illinois found at least two hallucinated cases in a brief David Reyes had filed in Pittman v. Hazel & Olive. Six days later Reyes answered. He put the problem down to "AI usage and insufficient cite checking" and told the court he had "implemented corrective measures to prevent a recurrence."

Seven days after that, he filed a motion for default judgment in Cole v. Hobby Town Unlimited, an ADA Title III case in the Central District of Illinois. Judge Sara Darrow's September 2 sanctions order says the motion "contained multiple AI-hallucinated cases," and it traces where they came from. In October 2025, Reyes "filed a nearly identical motion for default judgment in Hippe which included the same faulty citations." Hippe was in the Eastern District of Wisconsin. His explanation to the Cole court was that he had "relied in part on prior work product developed with the help of AI in similar ADA Title III matters, as a drafting aid and template."

The sanction was a $1,000 fine and an order to send the opinion to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission. The Wisconsin court had passed on sanctions in July because he withdrew his fee request.

Put the January 20 promise next to the January 27 filing. The corrective measures, whatever they were, lived on the checking side of the practice. The bad citations were sitting on the reuse side, in a document built to be copied. A go-by carries its authorities into every filing drafted from it, and each use makes it look more trustworthy, because paper that has been filed before reads like paper somebody already checked.

The motion type matters too. Default judgment motions are about as templated as litigation paper gets, and Hobby Town, according to the order, "has never appeared." Nobody on the other side was ever going to pull the cases. The only other reader was the judge, and the judge did.

The cheap moment to check a go-by is the day it becomes one. A check at that moment also catches the authority that was good law when the template was built and has since been overruled, which is a problem your form bank had long before anyone opened ChatGPT.

In Sea Swivel Inc. v. Shuttleslide LLC, Magistrate Judge Yeney Hernandez of the Southern District of Florida struck four affirmative defenses on September 2 and recast three more as denials. Along the way she noted that Shuttleslide had cited Affordable Aerial Photography v. Abdelsayed on timeliness, a question that case did not decide. Then: "It did not escape the Court's notice that Shuttleslide's Response is titled 'CoCounsel Skill Results.'" A footnote adds that the document's metadata "lists 'CoCounsel' in the 'Author' field."

The court declined, "at this juncture," to "draw a causal link between this apparent use of AI and counsel's mistaken reliance" on the case, and settled for a warning: "while AI has no Rule 11 obligations, the attorney who relies on it does."

The read: California's SB 574, now on the Governor's desk, would require lawyers who use generative AI to disclose that use to the court "for all documents submitted to the court." In Florida, the file properties made that disclosure without anyone deciding to. Open the properties panel on the last five PDFs your firm filed, see what the Author field says, and find out whether anything between the drafting tool and the e-filing portal clears it.

The D.C. Court of Appeals struck a brief in Douglas v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. on September 3 over four nonexistent cases, and referred the matter to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel. The attorney had used "Google's generative artificial intelligence search tool" to find authority. The appellant asked the court to register incredulity that "a competent law firm representing one of the largest financial institution[s] in the world could make" the mistake.

Senior Judge Stephen Glickman's concurrence is the part to keep. Guarding against hallucinated citations, he wrote, "can be a group effort that does not require every signatory to personally cite check." The vetting "may be done cost-effectively by a trained paralegal." Firms should be "adopting clear policies governing such use and providing for discipline when appropriate; and requiring attorneys to confirm that they have complied with those policies." And: "If training and oversight have been neglected, supervisory lawyers may be accountable as well."

The read: SB 574's amendment to California's Code of Civil Procedure says a filing "shall not contain any citations that an attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally verified." A paralegal cite-check built to the D.C. concurrence does not obviously satisfy the California sentence. If your firm files in both places on one workflow, put the two quotes side by side in front of whoever owns that workflow.

OpenAI's September 9 release notes for ChatGPT Enterprise added Library sharing. Members can "Invite recipients and assign Viewer or Editor access" to files and folders, or "Make content available to everyone in your workspace." The same entry describes the admin control: "Turning off Library sharing prevents new shares and permission changes. Existing shared content remains accessible, and members can still access content shared with them." Six days earlier, eligible Enterprise workspaces got the option to let Site owners "share live Sites with named external viewers."

The read: Your ethical walls are enforced in the document management system, and a file uploaded to a ChatGPT Library is a copy sitting outside it. If your firm runs ChatGPT Enterprise, settle the Library sharing setting before the first associate shares a folder with the whole workspace, because switching it off afterward leaves that share where it is.

Three federal courts in two states have now looked at David Reyes's citations. The third one fined him $1,000.

See you in the next one.