Trusting your firm's in-house AI tool to get the citations right
A hallucination with your firm's logo on it is still a hallucination. The branding does not make the cases real.
Not legal advice. Sally roasts behaviour and use-cases in general, never your specific situation, and nothing here replaces a real lawyer. The cases are real; what you do about them is between you and someone licensed to tell you.
Assuming a proprietary, firm-built legal AI tool is safe to cite from because it is "ours" and not a public chatbot.
Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc.
D. Wyo., sanctions order Feb. 2025 (docket-level) · US (D. Wyoming)
Three attorneys filed motions citing nine cases, eight of which did not exist, generated via their firm's in-house AI tool.
The judge imposed $5,000 total in sanctions and the lead attorney lost pro hac vice status. The firm escaped sanction by showing it had since mandated independent verification.
Even a major firm's own internal AI tool produced filings citing cases that did not exist. "It is our proprietary system" buys you nothing if nobody opened the cases. The signing attorney still carries the responsibility, no matter whose model generated the draft.
Notably, the firm itself avoided sanction by showing it had since mandated independent verification. The tool was not the safeguard. The policy of checking every cite was.
“You trusted the tool because it had your firm's name on it. So did the eight cases it invented.”
- 01Apply the same verification standard to internal tools that you would to any public chatbot. Same machine, same failure mode.
- 02Mandate independent citation checks as firm policy, in writing, and actually follow it.
- 03Make "who opened this case" a question with a name attached before anything is filed.
Not legal advice. General commentary on a use-case, not your situation. Talk to a real lawyer before you act.