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. Respondents’ counsel identified citations that were miscited or appeared to have been created by artificial intelligence. 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.” 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. Co-counsel Douglas M. Durbano was not involved in drafting the petition.

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. 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.” 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.”

The outcome

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), it ordered:

• 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) — 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” — and ABC4/KTVX (Nexstar, Sorina Trauntvein) — Bednar “was ordered to pay the respondent’s attorney fees for the petition and hearing, refund fees to their client … and donate $1,000.”

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.

Path to green

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 opinion — no client-confirmation call is required to establish them. A green badge, if TIN carries court-adjudicated honest-negatives, requires a human to confirm the docket’s compliance/appeal posture: whether Bednar filed proof of the $1,000 payment, the itemized fee/refund sums, and whether the sanction was appealed to the Utah Supreme Court (none located this session).