Miller v. Regions Bank: an Alabama attorney deleted his ChatGPT account to hide AI-fabricated citations, and lost far more than the case

The problem

On November 30, 2025, plaintiff Jackie Miller, through her attorney, solo practitioner H. Gregory Harp, filed a Response in Opposition to Regions Bank’s Motion for Summary Judgment in an ADA/FMLA employment-discrimination suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. The brief included four false quotations attributed to real appellate decisions: “In his Response, Mr. Harp includes four false quotations. (See Doc. 23 at 22, 24, 25, 32)” source. Two independent legal newsrooms read the record the same way: FindLaw reported that “the court determined that while four of the cases in the filing were real, the quotations attributed to them were not” source, and eDiscovery Today noted “he included four quotations which – although they were attributed to legitimate appellate decisions” were not genuine source.

What was built

No system was built or deployed, this is a court-origin AI-governance honest-negative. Harp used OpenAI’s ChatGPT in preparing the brief, and when the court investigated it was careful to draw the line between the tool and the misconduct: “The court is not sanctioning Attorney Harp merely for using generative AI. Attorneys may use such tools responsibly. The sanctionable conduct here includes Attorney Harp’s submission of false legal authority, lack of reasonable inquiry, lack of candor to the court, and destruction of evidence during the ensuing sanctions investigation” source. The provider is named in the order only because Harp used it; the court adjudicated conduct, not the product.

The outcome

After the court ordered Harp on April 20, 2026 to produce his complete ChatGPT history, his emails show “his ChatGPT account was deleted on April 23, 2026. (Doc. 38 at 4–5)”, three days later, and he obtained a prorated refund source. FindLaw recorded the same sequence independently: “there were records of him canceling the account on April 23, 2026, three days after being ordered by the court to produce the chat history and seven days before it would have expired” source, as did eDiscovery Today: “Harp deleted his ChatGPT account on April 23, 2026 – three days after being ordered to produce his ChatGPT history” source. Judge Mooty found bad-faith spoliation and drew an adverse inference that the missing history “would have shown that ChatGPT generated the fabricated quotations and related legal misrepresentations contained in the Response Brief” source.

Exercising the court’s inherent authority, the order reads: “The court PUBLICLY REPRIMANDS Attorney Harp for his misconduct,” directs “the Clerk of Court … to submit this order for publication in the Federal Supplement,” and holds that “Attorney Harp is DISQUALIFIED from further participation in this case” source. He was also “SUSPENDED from practice in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama for a period of six months” source, and “the Clerk of Court is DIRECTED to serve a copy of this order on the General Counsel of the Alabama State Bar and any other applicable licensing authorities for further proceedings as appropriate” source. eDiscovery Today summarized the disposition as “suspended from practicing in the Northern District of Alabama for six months, and referred to the Alabama State Bar and other disciplinary authorities” source, and FindLaw that his “license to practice in the Northern District of Alabama was suspended for six months. He was also disqualified from the case” source. The court’s summation: Harp “chose dishonesty over candor and destruction over disclosure” source.

The weakest load-bearing links, named where you meet them: every critical fact above rests first on the court’s own order (Tier 1), the primary origin, not a report of it. The two corroborating sources, eDiscovery Today and FindLaw, are legal-technology and legal-news blogs (Tier 2), not wire services; each carries the four-quotations finding, the April-23 account deletion, and the full disposition firsthand and independently of the other, but neither is the record itself. The order is self-sufficient here; the secondaries only widen the corroboration.

How this was verified

• Method: Every quoted figure and finding was read verbatim from sources fetched this session and re-bound against local captures with tools/quotecheck.py (13 quotes, 0 misses). No number is paraphrased, rounded, or recalled.
• Primary anchor: The Tier-1 sanctions ORDER (Doc. 39) in Miller v. Regions Bank, No. 2:24-cv-1324-HDM (N.D. Ala., Southern Division), signed by U.S. District Judge Harold D. Mooty III, May 21, 2026. The source PDF (362,431 bytes, sha1-b32 2JVB4S6VLYTY6D3FKR6V37Y6LDLHIJAG) is byte-identical to Wayback capture 20260527073340 (statuscode 200, application/pdf).
• Standard: Court-origin. The outcome is the adjudicated sanction, so the public record, not any subject’s confirmation, is the proof.
• Independence: The four-quotations finding, the April-23 ChatGPT-account deletion, and the disposition are each carried firsthand by two mutually independent legal newsrooms, eDiscovery Today (Doug Austin) and FindLaw (Kit Yona), neither relaying the other; the court’s order is the origin and is never counted toward corroboration.
• Conflation guard: Distinct from the two other N.D. Ala. AI-sanction cases in the corpus, Rivera v. Triad Properties (Judge Manasco, attorney Watkins) and Johnson v. Dunn (Butler Snow). The govinfo USCOURTS package for this docket is the July 21, 2026 merits opinion (Doc. 43), a different document, not this sanctions order.
• Open item: Whether Harp appealed or sought reconsideration, and the Alabama State Bar disposition of the referral.
• Verified on: 2026-08-05 (presentation rebuilt 2026-08-18).

Related case files

• McCarthy v. DEA (3d Cir.), a public reprimand for AI-fabricated citations on first impression, the same non-monetary discipline track Miller landed on, here at the appellate level rather than a district court’s suspension.
• Johnson v. Dunn (N.D. Ala.), Butler Snow attorneys disqualified over five ChatGPT-hallucinated citations, same court, a large-firm counterpoint to Miller’s solo practitioner, showing disqualification applied regardless of firm size.
• United States v. McGee (S.D. Ala.), $5,000 sanction against a ghostwriter for AI-fabricated citations, the same state’s Southern District, useful for reading Miller’s non-monetary discipline against a fixed-dollar Rule 11 benchmark.
• Wadsworth v. Walmart, $5,000 Rule 11 sanctions for AI-hallucinated citations by Morgan & Morgan lawyers, the fabrication-plus-sanction pattern without the spoliation aggravator that made Miller career-altering.

Sources

1. [Tier 1] U.S. District Court, N.D. Ala. (Southern Division) · Jackie L. Miller v. Regions Bank, No. 2:24-cv-1324-HDM, Order (Doc. 39), Judge Harold D. Mooty III · May 21, 2026 · https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Miller_v._Regions_Bank_USA_21_May_2026.pdf
2. [Tier 2] eDiscovery Today (Doug Austin) · “Career-Altering Sanctions Imposed on Counsel for Deleting ChatGPT Account: eDiscovery Case Law” · May 28, 2026 · https://ediscoverytoday.com/2026/05/28/career-altering-sanctions-imposed-on-counsel-for-deleting-chatgpt-account-ediscovery-case-law/
3. [Tier 2] FindLaw (Kit Yona) · “Alabama Attorney Suspended for Filing False Quotes and Deleting ChatGPT Account” · June 2, 2026 · https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/uncategorized/alabama-attorney-suspended-for-filing-false-quotes-and-deleting-chatgpt-account/