A Massachusetts judge fines a lawyer $2,000 for filing briefs full of AI-invented cases — the state's first

The problem

Darlene Smith, as personal representative of the estate of a young woman who died in February 2021 after years of alleged sexual exploitation “by three Stoughton police officers and the town’s animal control officer” source, brought a civil suit in the Massachusetts Superior Court (No. 2282CV01197). When defendants moved to dismiss, plaintiff’s counsel filed opposition memoranda that, in the court’s own words, “cite and rely, in part, upon wholly-fictitious case law (the ‘Fictitious Case Citations’) in opposing the motions to dismiss” source. Those citations were not real — an unidentified AI system had, in the court’s term, “hallucinated” them, and the court defined the failure generally: “AI hallucinations are false or completely imaginary information generated by an AI system” source. This underlying wrongful-death / civil-rights suit is unrelated to the sanction; the $2,000 is the only monetary figure in the AI-citation order.

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. Plaintiff’s counsel’s office had used an unidentified generative-AI system to locate legal authorities; the drafting was done by an associate attorney and two recent law-school graduates, and counsel reviewed the memoranda only for “style, grammar and flow, but not for accuracy of the case citations” source, then could not say which AI tool was used. The order names no product, so this record pins no specific tool; the court’s mentions of generative AI “such as ChatGPT and Google Bard” are illustrative examples, not a finding that either produced the citations. The court’s governing rule was stated in general terms: “any information supplied by a Generative AI system must be verified before it can be trusted” source. Two independent newsrooms read the predicate the same way: LawSites/LawNext recorded that “the lawyer filed three separate legal memoranda that cited and relied on fictitious cases” source, and BridgeTower’s Minnesota Lawyer reported the AI had “hallucinated,” “supplying at least four case names and corresponding citations that simply did not exist” source.

The outcome

Associate Justice Brian A. Davis imposed a monetary sanction under Massachusetts Rule of Civil Procedure 11. As Reason/Volokh’s verbatim reproduction of the order records, the court “consider[ed] the sanction imposed upon Plaintiff’s Counsel in this instance to be mild given the seriousness of the violations that occurred,” and ruled that “the Court will require Plaintiff’s Counsel to pay a monetary sanction in the amount of $2,000.00” source. BridgeTower’s Minnesota Lawyer reported the same result independently — “a monetary sanction — $2,000 — that Superior Court Judge Brian A. Davis called ‘mild given the seriousness of the violations that occurred’” source — and LawSites/LawNext described it the same way: “the judge decided to impose a sanction on the lawyer of $2,000 (payable to the court, not the opposing party)” source. Davis “withheld the name of the attorney ‘as a matter of professional courtesy, and because the Court’s principal intended audience for this decision and order is, in fact, the broader’ bar” source — so no attorney is named in this record. And this was a landmark: the Massachusetts Office of Bar Counsel, the state’s attorney-discipline authority, states firsthand that “the Massachusetts Superior Court [Hon. Brian Davis] … was the first in the state to sanction an attorney for submitting pleadings containing [AI-generated] fictitious case citations” source.

Why this belongs in the record

This is an AI-accountability record, not a vendor success story. It is one of the earliest court rulings — and the first in Massachusetts — to sanction a lawyer whose filing relied on AI-hallucinated citations, and it set the reasoning that later courts echoed: unverified generative-AI output is the lawyer’s liability, and a plausible-looking citation must be checked before it can be trusted. For anyone building or governing an AI-drafting workflow, the workflow detail is the lesson: the fabricated cases were produced by an unnamed tool, run by juniors, and passed to filing after a review “for style, grammar and flow, but not for accuracy of the case citations.”

The weakest load-bearing links, named where you meet them: the primary is the court’s own opinion (Tier 1), but that official PDF is a 16-page image-only scan with no text layer, so the court’s exact words are bound not to the PDF’s text but to reproductions of the order — chiefly Reason/Volokh, a legal-commentary site (Tier 2) that republishes the order verbatim. The two corroborating reports, BridgeTower’s Minnesota Lawyer and LawSites/LawNext, are secondaries (Tier 2), each carrying the $2,000 sanction and the fictitious-citation finding firsthand and neither relaying the other. The “first in Massachusetts” superlative rests on a single source — the Massachusetts Office of Bar Counsel’s own publication — which is the state discipline authority stating it firsthand, but is not independently corroborated.

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, archive-bound order, and the $2,000 sanction and the fabrication finding are each carried firsthand by three mutually independent newsrooms, so corroboration stands at two_independent. The remaining steps are human and post-judgment, and are asserted by no claim: whether counsel paid the $2,000, any appeal or reconsideration of the February 2024 order, and any subsequent Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers follow-on (the court withheld the attorney’s name). 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. No number or holding is paraphrased, rounded, or recalled.
• Primary anchor: The Tier-1 opinion in Smith v. Farwell, No. 2282CV01197 (Mass. Super. Ct., Associate Justice Brian A. Davis, decided Feb. 2024). The official opinion PDF (Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly host, 12-007-24.pdf) is a 16-page image-only scan with no text layer (pdf-parse yields zero text), so its quotes bind to independent newsroom reproductions rather than to the PDF’s own text; the PDF is nonetheless archive-bound and byte-tied — local copy sha1-b32 W6LD64LW73ZEYQHTBJ52PTDJHZZGROLY = the Wayback CDX digest on every capture (earliest 20240218020507).
• Standard: Court-origin. The outcome is the adjudicated Rule 11 sanction, so the public record — not any subject’s confirmation — is the proof.
• Independence: The $2,000 sanction and the fictitious-citation finding are each carried firsthand by three mutually independent archive-bound newsrooms — Reason/Volokh (reproduces the order verbatim), BridgeTower’s Minnesota Lawyer (Kris Olson), and LawSites/LawNext (Bob Ambrogi) — none relaying another; the court’s order is the origin and is never counted toward corroboration. The “first in Massachusetts” line rests on the single firsthand statement of the Massachusetts Office of Bar Counsel (byte-tied, sha1-b32 LGHTL7KOIAIKRMYCWEBPXUFH47MUEHQX).
• Conflation guards: The AI tool is unidentified — no product is named, and any “ChatGPT” attribution would be unsupported. The attorney’s name is withheld by the court. The $2,000 is the only monetary figure; the underlying wrongful-death / civil-rights merits are unrelated to the sanction.
• Open item: Whether counsel paid the $2,000, any appeal or reconsideration, and any BBO follow-on.
• Verified on: 2026-08-03 (presentation rebuilt 2026-08-18).

Related case files

• Ringo v. Colquhoun (Oregon Court of Appeals) — a $2,000 AI-fabricated-citation sanction, itemized per cite and per quote — the closest dollar-for-dollar sibling: the same $2,000 figure for the same conduct, but at a different tier of court and with the penalty itemized rather than set as a round Rule 11 sanction.
• Noland v. Land of the Free (California Court of Appeal) — the first published opinion sanctioning AI-fabricated citations, $10,000 — a “first”-of-its-kind parallel from another state, useful for reading Smith’s “first in Massachusetts” landmark against a first published appellate opinion.
• Wadsworth v. Walmart (D. Wyo.) — Morgan & Morgan attorneys hit with $5,000 in Rule 11 sanctions for AI-hallucinated citations — the same Rule 11 mechanism at a higher figure, showing how the sanction scales with the firm and the seriousness.
• United States v. McGee (S.D. Ala.) — $5,000 sanction after a ghostwriter’s legal-AI fabricated citations — a federal counterpart on the workflow question Smith raises: who owns the verification duty when the fabricating hand is a junior or a ghostwriter, not the signing lawyer.

Sources

1. [Tier 1] Massachusetts Superior Court · Smith v. Farwell, No. 2282CV01197 — opinion and order on sanctions (Associate Justice Brian A. Davis); image-only scan, quotes bound to reproductions · February 2024 · https://masslawyersweekly.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2024/02/12-007-24.pdf
2. [Tier 2] Reason / The Volokh Conspiracy (Eugene Volokh) · “$2,000 Sanction in Another AI-Hallucinated-Citation Case” (reproduces the order verbatim) · February 16, 2024 · https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/16/2000-sanction-in-another-ai-hallucinated-citation-case/
3. [Tier 2] BridgeTower Media / Minnesota Lawyer (Kris Olson) · “Judge sanctions Massachusetts attorney misled by AI” · February 28, 2024 · https://minnlawyer.com/2024/02/28/judge-sanctions-massachusetts-attorney-misled-by-ai/
4. [Tier 2] LawSites / LawNext (Bob Ambrogi) · “Not Again! Two More Cases, Just This Week, of Hallucinated Citations in Court Filings Leading to Sanctions” · February 22, 2024 · https://www.lawnext.com/2024/02/not-again-two-more-cases-just-this-week-of-hallucinated-citations-in-court-filings-leading-to-sanctions.html
5. [Tier 1] Massachusetts Office of Bar Counsel · “Two Years of Fake Cases and the Courts are Ratcheting up the Sanctions” (citing Smith v. Farwell, 2024 WL 4002576) · 2025 · https://bbopublic.massbbo.org/web/f/Two%20Years%20of%20Fake%20Cases%20and%20the%20Courts%20are%20Ratcheting%20up%20the%20Sanctions.pdf