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AI in Court

Lawyers' Bar Journal Article Discussing Their AI-Hallucination Errors Doesn't Entirely Satisfy Judge, but …

the judge declines to issue sanctions, in part because “their expressions of repentance are made in good faith.”

Eugene Volokh | 6.16.2026 2:03 PM

From Doe v. Univ. of N.C. Sys., decided today by Chief Judge Martin Reidlinger (W.D.N.C.):

On November 10, 2025, the Court ordered the Plaintiff's counsel to show cause as to why they should not be sanctioned for the many errors in the documents they submitted to the Court, including: (1) citing two cases that do not appear to exist (i.e., hallucinated citations); (2) quoting material that does not exist in the cases purportedly quoted (i.e., hallucinated quotations); (3) mischaracterizing holdings of cited cases; (4) citing cases that have no bearing on the proposition for which they were cited; and (5) failing to provide pinpoint citations and information identifying the courts from which opinions issued.

On November 19, 2025, during a hearing on the show cause order, the Plaintiff's counsel admitted these errors and explained that, in large part, the errors resulted from misuse of artificial intelligence software (including a misunderstanding of how to properly use artificial intelligence) and a failure to verify the outputs of artificial intelligence software, even though the Plaintiff's counsel had signed certifications stating that they had verified every statement and every citation in the documents they submitted to the Court. The Plaintiff's counsel expressed remorse and offered to write an article for the state bar journal explaining their errors and the potential pitfalls of misusing artificial intelligence. The Court agreed that such an article—"an article that essentially says, we really screwed up and we almost got put under the jail, don't fall into the pit that we did"—could help other lawyers wake up to the seriousness of attorney misuse of artificial intelligence. The Court has refrained from discharging the show cause order pending counsel's preparation of the article.

The Plaintiff's counsel submitted their proposed article to the North Carolina State Bar Journal, and it has now been published. Fred W. DeVore III and Rob Wilder, Guarding Against AI Errors: Ethical Risks for NC Attorneys, N.C. State Bar J. 1, 8-12 (Summer 2026) (hereinafter "the Article"). Now before the Court is the issue of whether this Article is sufficient to purge the show cause order and the........

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