# An AI-drafted petition, a 'wrong draft' excuse, and a referral to the Florida Bar: JMOR Properties v. Artist Alley Townhomes

> In JMOR Properties, LLC v. Artist Alley Townhomes, LLC (No. 4D2026-1787, Aug. 12, 2026), Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal, sitting per curiam, referred attorney Barry M. Leff to the Florida Bar after he filed a certiorari petition it found 'riddled with false citations and arguments' — an AI-drafted petition he said he filed in the wrong, unverified version — holding that the mistaken-draft excuse did not cure the duty to verify or the duty of competence.

- Verification status: pending
- Case type: deployment
- Provider: District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, Fourth District (per curiam; Gross, Ciklin, and Forst, JJ.) (https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf)
- Client: District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, Fourth District — JMOR Properties, LLC v. Artist Alley Townhomes, LLC (No. 4D2026-1787), Courts / legal profession (AI-governance honest-negative) (named)
- Sector: legal / US / cross
- Canonical URL: https://theinternetninja.com/stories/jmor-properties-v-artist-alley-fla-4th-dca-leff-florida-bar-referral-ai-drafted-certiorari-fabricated-citations-2026/
- Source: The Internet Ninja (theinternetninja.com), independent verified-proof platform

## Outcomes

| Metric | Before | After |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Certiorari petition found 'riddled with false citations and arguments,' including a non-existent case allegedly from that Court |  |  |
| Attorney's account: an AI-drafted initial draft was filed unverified when he 'worked from the wrong version' |  |  |
| Sanction: referral to the Florida Bar for consideration of disciplinary proceedings (non-monetary); no AI product named |  |  |

## Verification method

Court-adjudicated public record: the Aug. 12, 2026 per-curiam opinion of Florida's Fourth DCA (No. 4D2026-1787), extracted from the source PDF (sha1-b32 QYY5W6YZSLDP3UNZLMXYOMODE6PVNTP2, 93,730 B) and re-bound to local captures with quotecheck, plus two mutually independent legal newsrooms carrying both critical facts firsthand — eDiscovery LLC (Michael Berman, 2026-08-15) and Mealey's Artificial Intelligence / LexisNexis (2026-08-13). Court-origin: green never depends on subject confirmation. Awaits human owner sign-off; not verified.

## Full case file

## The problem
On August 12, 2026, the District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, Fourth District — sitting per curiam (Judges Gross, Ciklin, and Forst) — referred attorney Barry M. Leff to the Florida Bar for consideration of disciplinary proceedings. Leff, of the Law Offices of Barry M. Leff, P.A., in Fort Lauderdale, represented petitioner JMOR Properties, LLC in a petition for writ of certiorari (No. 4D2026-1787): "Having considered counsel Barry M. Leff's July 10, 2026 response to this Court's order to show cause, the Court imposes the sanction of referring counsel to the Florida Bar" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf). The court found the petition was one that "is riddled with false citations and arguments, including an unsupported allegation that this Court has 'repeatedly entertained, and granted, certiorari review of orders vacating clerk's defaults'" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf), and that "the petition cited a non-existent case allegedly from this Court and cited other cases that do not support this proposition" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf). Two independent legal newsrooms read the record the same way: eDiscovery LLC's Michael Berman recorded that "the attorney was referred to the Florida Bar for disciplinary proceedings" [source](https://www.ediscoveryllc.com/i-filed-the-wrong-draft-is-not-a-defense-when-it-contained-hallucinations/), and Mealey's Artificial Intelligence reported that "a Florida appellate court referred an attorney to the state bar" [source](https://www.mealeys.com/mealeys/mealeys-artificial-intelligence/articles/2513775).

Procedurally, this sanction is distinct from the merits. The court had already "dismissed the petition and ordered counsel to show cause why he ... should not be sanctioned for filing the problematic petition" on June 30, 2026 — a jurisdictional dismissal, because "we lack jurisdiction" over a clerk's default, which "does not constitute irreparable harm for certiorari purposes" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf). The August 12 order resolved only the show-cause sanction.

## What was built
No system was built or deployed — this is a court-origin AI-governance honest-negative, and the "provider" here is the acting court, not a vendor. The AI angle is admitted and central. In his response to the show-cause order, counsel "explains that his normal process is to have artificial intelligence ('AI') software research and draft the initial document, and he then verifies every citation and revises the draft" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf). He said he had done that here and removed the fake citations, "but while he was making final edits, he inadvertently worked from the wrong version and ended up filing the AI's initial draft with this Court" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf). Michael Berman's account quotes the same admission, that counsel "inadvertently worked from the wrong version and ended up filing the AI's initial draft with this Court" [source](https://www.ediscoveryllc.com/i-filed-the-wrong-draft-is-not-a-defense-when-it-contained-hallucinations/), and Mealey's summarizes it as a petition "containing artificial-intelligence-generated errors" whose author "chalked the mistakes up to the filing of the wrong version of the document" [source](https://www.mealeys.com/mealeys/mealeys-artificial-intelligence/articles/2513775). The order names no AI product — it says only "AI software" — so this record pins no tool.

## The outcome
The court rejected the mistaken-draft explanation. It held that "counsel's explanation that he mistakenly submitted the wrong draft of the petition does not excuse the failure to verify the accuracy of all citations in his filing" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf). It went further on competence: even crediting that counsel "was not intentionally trying to mislead this Court, the failure to discover the controlling law shows a violation of the duty of competence" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf) — the point at which the AI workflow's convenience becomes the lawyer's liability, since "any competent research (using AI or otherwise) should have revealed the abundant caselaw directly addressing our lack of jurisdiction, which has been settled since at least 1979" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf). Berman recorded the same competence holding independently: "the failure to discover the controlling law shows a violation of the duty of competence" [source](https://www.ediscoveryllc.com/i-filed-the-wrong-draft-is-not-a-defense-when-it-contained-hallucinations/). The disposition: "Accordingly, we refer this matter to the Florida Bar for consideration of disciplinary proceedings" [source](https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf). The sanction is a Bar referral — a professional, non-monetary consequence; the order imposes no fine.

## Why this belongs in the record
This is an AI-accountability record, not a vendor success story. It joins a growing line of court rulings sanctioning lawyers whose filings contained AI-hallucinated citations, but with a distinctive fact pattern: counsel did not deny using AI or claim ignorance of the risk. He described a verify-then-file workflow and said he simply filed the wrong, unverified draft. The court's answer — that this does not cure the duty to verify, and that failing to find settled controlling law is itself a competence violation — is the part worth citing for anyone building or governing an AI-drafting workflow.

**The weakest load-bearing links, named where you meet them:** every critical fact above rests first on the court's own per-curiam opinion (Tier 1) — the primary origin, not a report of it. The two corroborating sources are secondaries (Tier 2): eDiscovery LLC is a legal-technology commentator's analysis blog, not a wire service, and the Mealey's item is a LexisNexis legal-news desk whose full body is paywalled, so only its public lede is bound here. Each independently carries the Bar referral and the AI-drafted "wrong version" account, and neither relays the other; but neither is the record itself, and the order is self-sufficient on every critical claim.

## Path to green
This is a court-origin honest-negative — there is no client to call, and green never depends on the sanctioned attorney or the court agreeing. The court-stated facts are anchored to a published, citable per-curiam opinion, and each critical claim is carried firsthand by two mutually independent legal newsrooms, so corroboration stands at two_independent. The remaining steps are human and post-judgment: the opinion states it is "not final until disposition of timely-filed motion for rehearing," so a human should confirm no rehearing motion has disturbed it, and, ideally, record the Florida Bar's disposition of the referral. No green badge is sought; `verified` is human-only.

## How this was verified
- **Method:** Every quoted finding was read verbatim from the sources captured this session and re-bound against local copies with `tools/quotecheck.py`. No number or holding is paraphrased, rounded, or recalled.
- **Primary anchor:** The Tier-1 per-curiam opinion in *JMOR Properties, LLC v. Artist Alley Townhomes, LLC*, No. 4D2026-1787 (Fla. 4th DCA, filed Aug. 12, 2026), Judges Gross, Ciklin, and Forst. The source PDF (93,730 bytes, sha1-b32 `QYY5W6YZSLDP3UNZLMXYOMODE6PVNTP2`) retrieved from the Charlotin document store is byte-identical to the S3 re-host cited above; text extracted to `sources/captures/jmor-v-artist-alley-order-pdftext.txt`.
- **Standard:** Court-origin. The outcome *is* the adjudicated Bar referral, so the public record — not any subject's confirmation — is the proof.
- **Independence:** The Bar referral and the AI-drafted "wrong version" account are each carried firsthand by two mutually independent legal newsrooms — eDiscovery LLC (Michael Berman) and Mealey's Artificial Intelligence (LexisNexis) — neither relaying the other; the court's opinion is the origin and is never counted toward corroboration.
- **Conflation guards:** The appellate certiorari proceeding (No. 4D2026-1787) is kept distinct from the underlying Palm Beach County circuit case (L.T. No. 502025CA005178XXXAMB, Judge Danielle A. Sherriff); the June 30 jurisdictional dismissal is distinct from the August 12 sanction; the sanction is a Bar referral only, with no monetary penalty and no named AI product.
- **Open item:** Whether a timely rehearing motion disturbed the opinion, and the Florida Bar's disposition of the referral. Wayback byte-tie deferred while the Internet Archive was down at capture time (flagged, not concealed).
- **Verified on:** 2026-08-17 (presentation rebuilt 2026-08-18).

## Related case files
- [*In re Nwaubani* (4th Cir.) — public admonishment of an attorney over AI-fabricated citations](/stories/in-re-nwaubani-4th-cir-standing-panel-attorney-discipline-ai-fabricated-citations-public-admonishment-2026/) — the closest sibling on remedy: a professional, non-monetary discipline (admonishment) for the same AI-hallucinated-citation conduct, a federal counterpart to Florida's Bar referral.
- [*McCarthy v. DEA* (3d Cir.) — first-impression public reprimand for AI-fabricated citations, no monetary penalty](/stories/mccarthy-v-dea-3d-cir-24-2704-ai-fabricated-citations-public-reprimand-first-impression-2026/) — another professional-discipline outcome without a fine, useful for reading *JMOR*'s referral against a reprimand on comparable facts.
- [Connecticut Supreme Court (*TOV Realty*) — attorneys referred to the bar plus CLE and a donation for ChatGPT-hallucinated citations](/stories/ct-supreme-court-tov-realty-kosel-gottlieb-glg-law-chatgpt-hallucinated-citations-1000-donation-cle-first-impression-2026/) — a state high-court parallel that also chose a bar referral, showing the same professional-discipline reflex at the top of a state judiciary.
- [*Romero v. Corona Investments* (7th Cir.) — counsel admonished, but no sanction, for AI-hallucinated citations](/stories/romero-v-corona-investments-7th-cir-bach-ai-hallucinated-citations-admonished-no-sanction-511a-2026/) — the lenient end of the spectrum: the same verify-failure conduct met with a warning rather than a referral, a useful contrast to *JMOR*'s escalation to the Bar.

## Sources
1. **[Tier 1]** District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, Fourth District · *JMOR Properties, LLC v. Artist Alley Townhomes, LLC*, No. 4D2026-1787 — per-curiam opinion (Gross, Ciklin, and Forst, JJ.) · August 12, 2026 · https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/JMOR_Properties_LLC_v._Artist_Alley_Townhomes_LLC_et_al._USA_12_August_2026.pdf
2. **[Tier 2]** eDiscovery LLC (Michael Berman) · "'I Filed the Wrong Draft' is Not a Defense When it Contained Hallucinations" · August 15, 2026 · https://www.ediscoveryllc.com/i-filed-the-wrong-draft-is-not-a-defense-when-it-contained-hallucinations/
3. **[Tier 2]** Mealey's Artificial Intelligence (LexisNexis) · "Florida Court Refers Attorney To Bar After 'Numerous' Errors In Petition" · August 13, 2026 · https://www.mealeys.com/mealeys/mealeys-artificial-intelligence/articles/2513775