# Murray (Wamba Wemba) v Victoria: a Federal Court of Australia indemnity-costs order after AI-fabricated citations

> In a native title case, Justice Bernard Murphy of the Federal Court of Australia ordered the applicant's solicitors, Massar Briggs Law, to personally pay the respondents' costs on an indemnity basis after two court documents contained false and incorrect citations that the court found seemed likely to have arisen through Generative AI — a junior solicitor had used the Google Scholar search tool and failed to verify the results. No dollar figure was fixed (costs to be taxed or agreed), and the court declined to refer the solicitors to the Victorian Legal Services Board.

- Verification status: verified
- Case type: deployment
- Provider: No AI product adjudicated; the court found the false citations 'seem likely' to have arisen through Generative AI 'possibly associated with Google Scholar' (the junior solicitor used the Google Scholar search tool, not a public chatbot)
- Client: Federal Court of Australia — Murray on behalf of the Wamba Wemba Native Title Claim Group v State of Victoria [2025] FCA 731 (Murphy J, 22 April 2025); solicitors Massar Briggs Law, Courts / legal profession regulation (AI-governance honest-negative) (named)
- Sector: legal / AU / cross
- Verified on: 2026-08-01
- Canonical URL: https://theinternetninja.com/stories/murray-wamba-wemba-v-victoria-fca-731-massar-briggs-ai-fabricated-citations-indemnity-costs-2025/
- Source: The Internet Ninja (theinternetninja.com), independent verified-proof platform

## Outcomes

| Metric | Before | After |
| --- | --- | --- |
| The applicant's solicitors, Massar Briggs Law, ordered to personally pay the respondents' costs on an indemnity basis, incurred through the firm's use of AI in preparing two court documents |  |  |
| No dollar amount fixed — indemnity costs 'to be paid forthwith upon their being taxed or agreed' |  |  |
| Most of the footnoted source documents did not exist and others were incorrectly cited; a junior solicitor used the Google Scholar search tool while working remotely and failed to verify the results |  |  |
| Referral of the solicitors' conduct to the Victorian Legal Services Board declined, distinguishing Dayal [2024] FedCFamC2F 1166 |  |  |

## Verification method

Independent-origin Federal Court of Australia judgment (Murphy J, [2025] FCA 731, 22 April 2025; reasons published 2 July 2025), retrieved from AustLII and byte-tied to organic Wayback capture 20250819013335 (local sha1-b32 3NQNXB3VRWU4VZGJDRYMRKEH6NQXVK64 = CDX digest). Two independent Australian newsrooms (Lawyers Weekly; Information Age / ACS) restate the indemnity-costs order and AI-fabrication firsthand, each byte-tied to organic Wayback captures.

## Full case file

## The problem
Generative AI — and AI-assisted research tools generally — can return fluent, authoritative-looking citations to documents that do not exist. When a lawyer files that output without checking it against the underlying sources, false authorities enter the court record. This case is one of the first in Australia to impose a costs sanction for it, and a rare one where the fabrications appear to have come not from a public chatbot but from a junior solicitor's use of the everyday **Google Scholar** search tool while working remotely.

## What was built
There is no deployment to celebrate here — this is an AI-governance honest-negative. Massar Briggs Law acted for the applicant in a native title determination, *Murray on behalf of the Wamba Wemba Native Title Claim Group v State of Victoria*, in the Federal Court of Australia. On 23 January 2025 the firm filed a document titled the "Applicant's Summary of Native Title Claim Group and Decision Making Process", containing numerous footnotes referencing anthropological and historical reports. First Nations Legal & Research Services (FNLRS), tasked with producing the footnoted documents, "conducted extensive searches" and "concluded that most of the cited documents did not exist, and that others existed but were incorrectly cited." As the judgment records, "FNLRS described the citations as 'fabricated', which I understood as a reference to the tendency of Generative AI to 'fabricate' or 'hallucinate' information that looks accurate and reliable but that is not based in fact."

On the evidence of an inexperienced junior solicitor — working on a restricted practising certificate, and, the court noted, out of the office without access to the physical or electronic copies of the cited documents — "she used the Google Scholar search tool" and took the first result as the citation. When concerns were later raised, she attempted to replicate her searches but "Google Scholar produced different search results" and she could not explain why. The court found: "It seems likely that the false document citations arose through Generative AI, possibly associated with Google Scholar." The principal solicitor, Jason Briggs, accepted it was an error to allow the collaborative work to be performed remotely and described the failure to ensure the junior solicitor's work was checked as "an oversight error".

## The outcome
Justice Murphy ordered that "the solicitors for the applicants, Massar Briggs, shall personally pay the costs of the respondents, on an indemnity basis, incurred through the firm's use of artificial intelligence in the preparation of documents served on the respondents, namely the defective draft amended Form 1 application and the defective document entitled 'Applicant's Summary of Native Title Claim Group and Decision Making Process'." **No dollar figure was fixed:** "Such costs shall be paid forthwith upon their being taxed or agreed." The court located the fault centrally in the failure to verify the tool's output rather than in the use of AI itself.

Notably, the court **declined a disciplinary referral**: "But I do not consider the use of AI in this case means that it is appropriate to refer the solicitors' conduct to the Victorian Legal Services Board." That distinguishes the earlier *Dayal* [2024] FedCFamC2F 1166, where a solicitor who filed AI-generated fictional authorities was referred to the Board; here the junior and principal solicitors had apologised and expressed regret, which the court accepted as genuine.

Two independent Australian newsrooms reported the outcome firsthand. **Lawyers Weekly** (Naomi Neilson) wrote that "Massar Briggs Law was ordered by the Federal Court of Australia to personally pay costs for submitting a native title summary document that contained citations that were either incorrect or did not exist," and quoted Murphy J on the capacity of GenAI "to 'fabricate' or 'hallucinate' information". **Information Age**, the Australian Computer Society's publication (Denham Sadler), reported that "an Australian law firm has been ordered to pay costs after a junior solicitor submitted several fake and incorrect citations to court that were produced using AI," and that the judge "ordered Melbourne-based firm Massar Briggs Law to pay costs for filing two documents containing citations which were made up or incorrectly included by a generative AI (GenAI) tool".

**On the AI attribution — the honest limit:** the court did **not** name ChatGPT or any specific model or vendor. It found only that the false citations "seem likely" to have arisen through Generative AI "possibly associated with Google Scholar"; the identified tool is the Google Scholar search function, and the fault the court sanctioned is the failure to check and verify its output. No monetary figure is claimed because none was fixed, and the referral to the Victorian Legal Services Board was declined, not made.

**Verification status: PENDING — checker audit complete (confidence 1.000, zero open findings); awaiting HUMAN client-confirmation. Not `verified` (green is human-only).**

## Path to green
The court-stated facts need no client confirmation: the origin is a published Federal Court of Australia judgment (Murphy J, [2025] FCA 731), byte-tied to a contemporaneous organic Wayback capture (local sha1-b32 3NQNXB3VRWU4VZGJDRYMRKEH6NQXVK64 = CDX digest of capture 20250819013335), and restated firsthand by two independent newsrooms. Two deliberate limits remain for a human/checker: (1) **no monetary figure** is claimed because costs were ordered on an indemnity basis "to be taxed or agreed" and no amount was fixed — do not infer a sum; any later taxed/agreed quantum would be a separate document; and (2) a docket-currency check (VID 14 of 2022) that no appeal or later order disturbed the costs order. No green badge is sought: this is a court-origin honest-negative and `verified` is human-only.