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AI in Court

Attorney Fee Award Cut from $100K to $50K, Partly as Sanction for Hallucinated Citations

Eugene Volokh | 11.7.2026 10:58 AM

In Ellis v. McNeese, written by Kansas District Court Judge W. Lee Fowler (decided April 22 but just posted on Westlaw), plaintiff's lawyer prevailed in getting his client reinstated as a nursing student who was punished by Flint Hills Technical College for a religiously motivated vaccine refusal. But when it came to getting attorney fees (which are allowed by the Kansas Preservation of Religious Freedom Act), the lawyer fared worse. The court concluded, for various reasons, that the lawyer would normally have been entitled to $100K in fees rather than the $300K he claimed, but then it went on to reduce the fees even further:

On October 20, 2025, Plaintiff's counsel filed a document entitled Opposition to Defendants Motion to Alter Judgment. Within that pleading the Plaintiff's counsel falsely cited two cases, State v. Baker, 290 Kan. 842, 235 P.3d 424 (2010) and Gannon v. State, 298 Kan. 110 310 P.3d 1196 (2014) for propositions of legal authority that are inconsistent with the case cited. In addition, there were no fewer than six false citations to non-existent Kansas case law. When confronted by these misrepresentations and facing a Motion for Sanctions, Plaintiff's counsel did not deny the allegations or explain how he came up with the false........

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