Garner v. Kadince: Utah Court of Appeals Sanctions Counsel for ChatGPT-Hallucinated Citations (2025 UT App 80)

The problem

Petitioner Matthew Garner’s counsel filed a petition for interlocutory appeal to the Utah Court of Appeals, and Respondents’ counsel identified citations that were miscited or appeared to have been created by artificial intelligence (source). As the court recorded, “As the primary example, Respondents’ counsel pointed to the citation to ‘Royer v. Nelson, 2007 UT App 74, 156 P.3d 789’ as an AI ‘hallucinated’ case that does not exist anywhere other than on ChatGPT” (source). The petition had been drafted by an unlicensed law clerk who used ChatGPT, and the signing attorney, Richard A. Bednar, did not independently check its accuracy before filing it (source). Co-counsel Douglas M. Durbano was not involved in drafting the petition (source).

What was built

This is an AI-governance honest-negative, not a deployment win: the “system” is generative AI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, used as an unverified legal-drafting tool (source). The court did not condemn AI itself; quoting Mata v. Avianca, it noted “there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable [AI] tool for assistance,” but that “existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings” (source). Petitioner’s counsel “fell short of their gatekeeping responsibilities as members of the Utah State Bar when they submitted a petition that contained fake precedent generated by ChatGPT” (source).

The outcome

The finding: a rule 40 violation of the Utah Rules of Appellate Procedure. On its Order to Show Cause, the court “finds that Petitioner’s counsel violated rule 40 of the Utah Rules of Appellate Procedure and imposes sanctions,” in the published per curiam opinion (2025 UT App 80, filed May 22, 2025) (source). It ordered (source):

• Mr. Bednar to “pay the attorney fees of Respondents for the time spent responding to the Petition and attending the OSC hearing”;
• Petitioner’s counsel to “refund to Petitioner all fees charged and paid for the filing of the Petition or related thereto within seven days of the date of this order”;
• Mr. Bednar to “pay $1,000 in the form of a donation to ‘and Justice for all’ within fourteen days of the date of this order and file proof of payment with this court.”

Two independent Utah newsrooms reported the sanctions firsthand. KSL (Emily Ashcraft) wrote that Bednar “was ordered not only to pay the opposing party’s attorneys’ fees … but to refund his own client any fees associated with his filing of the petition” (source). ABC4/KTVX (Nexstar) reported that Bednar was ordered to pay the respondent’s attorney fees for the petition and hearing, refund fees to the client, and donate $1,000 (source).

The itemized dollar amounts of the attorney-fee award and the client refund are ordered but not fixed in the opinion, and are not asserted here (source).

How this was verified

This case carries a green badge under TIN’s current standard: independently validated by TIN against the public record. The sanction, the $1,000 donation, the seven-day refund deadline and the fourteen-day donation deadline are all stated verbatim in the signed, published per curiam opinion (Tier 1), which was byte-tied to a Wayback capture (CDX sha1-b32 NQIZJTQX4QONOHA4222QIXXYSPJ4D7CZ, 2025-06-02) and re-checked live on 2026-08-13. All quoted language was verified verbatim against the local capture with quotecheck.py, and two independent Utah newsrooms, KSL and ABC4/KTVX, corroborate the sanctions firsthand. No client-confirmation call is required, because every ordered figure comes from the court’s own document. The honest limit: the opinion orders but does not fix the dollar amounts of the attorney-fee award and the client refund, so only the $1,000 donation is a fixed sum; no appeal to the Utah Supreme Court was located as of the live check.

Related case files

Garner is Utah’s first published appellate opinion on AI-hallucinated citations, and it sits alongside the same first-in-a-state moment in California: Noland v. Land of the Free, the first published California appellate opinion to sanction fabricated AI citations. The pro-se parallel is Kruse v. Karlen, where an appellant’s brief cited 22 of 24 fictitious cases and drew a frivolous-appeal sanction. At the trial-court level the same failure recurs in Wadsworth v. Walmart, where Morgan & Morgan attorneys drew Rule 11 sanctions for AI-hallucinated citations.

Sources

Cited in this case file. Tier 1 = the signed, published court opinion; Tier 2 = independent press naming the parties. Each figure was checked against the live source on 2026-08-13.

1. Utah Court of Appeals, “Garner v. Kadince, 2025 UT App 80” (per curiam), No. 20250188-CA, filed 2025-05-22 (Tier 1, signed published appellate opinion). https://legacy.utcourts.gov/opinions/view.html?court=appopin&opinion=Garner+v.+Kadince20250522_20250188_80.pdf
2. KSL (Emily Ashcraft), “Utah attorneys sanctioned by appeals court for using AI to write legal brief,” 2025 (Tier 2, independent newsroom). https://www.ksl.com/article/51324994/utah-attorneys-sanctioned-by-appeals-court-for-using-ai-to-write-legal-brief
3. ABC4/KTVX (Nexstar), “Utah lawyer sanctioned for court filing that used ChatGPT and referenced nonexistent court case,” 2025 (Tier 2, independent newsroom). https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/utah-lawyer-filing-chatgpt/