TSXG Galicia: Spain's High Court of Justice of Galicia fines a lawyer €1,800 for an appeal built on 24 AI-fabricated citations — and sizes the fine to a legal-AI subscription

Verification status: PENDING — checker-graduated (confidence 1.000), awaiting HUMAN client-confirmation. NOT verified, NOT green. This is an honest-negative, court-origin AI-governance record, not a client testimonial. No green badge is sought; the war-room never sets verified.

The problem

A lawyer filed a recurso de suplicación (a social-jurisdiction appeal, here in a temporary-disability matter) before the Sala de lo Social of the Tribunal Superior de Xustiza de Galicia (TSXG) in A Coruña. Verifying the brief’s citations one by one against the free public CENDOJ database, the court found “veinticuatro citas jurisprudenciales que no se corresponden con un contenido real/efectivo, pues o bien son erróneas en cuanto a su sentido o bien directamente inventadas” — 24 of the 32 citations in the brief, “el 75% de las citas”. The lawyer acknowledged the facts and apologised, but “no ha ofrecido explicación suficiente sobre … la herramienta empleada (qué IA utilizó)”.

What was built

No system was built. The court attributed the fabricated citations to unverified generative AI: they resulted “tras la perniciosa –y habitual- «alucinación» de la inteligencia artificial utilizada para su redacción.” It stressed that using generative tools demands both ex-ante evaluation and ex-post verification of the output (“reserva de humanidad”), and held the failure to check the citations “una quiebra manifiesta del deber de control humano” and a breach of “el principio de buena fe procesal consagrado en el artículo 75.4” LJS. The order names no specific AI product used by the lawyer.

The outcome

The Sala resolved: “LA SALA RESUELVE IMPONER al Letrado don XXX una multa de MIL OCHOCIENTOS EUROS (1800€)”, under article 75.4 LJS, which “faculta a este Tribunal para imponer, mediante resolución motivada y en pieza separada, una multa de 600 hasta 6000 euros”, and ordered that “se dará traslado al Ilustre Colegio de Abogados de A Coruña (ICACOR) a los efectos disciplinarios que procedan.” Distinctively, the court sized the fine to the cost of the remedy: verified legal-AI subscriptions from the main Spanish legal publishers carry “planes de acceso anual que oscilan, en modalidades básicas, entre 1500 y 3000 euros (Sof-IA de Tirant, GenIA-L de Lefebvre, K+ de Aranzadi, Vicent AI de vLex, Prudencia.ai o Harvey AI)”, any of which — or the free CENDOJ database — “habría impedido el resultado que ahora se enjuicia.” It set €1,800 (a 3× multiplier on the €600 floor), weighing the lawyer’s admission of the facts and lack of prior record as mitigating factors.

Path to green

Not applicable in the client-testimonial sense — every figure already rests on a tier-1 published order of a superior court (an independent adjudicator), byte-tied to a Wayback capture and corroborated firsthand by two independent, archive-bound Spanish newsrooms (Economist & Jurist; El Correo Gallego), with Galicia Press a third carrier. No client-confirmation call is needed to establish the facts, and no green badge is sought. The public record could be independently confirmed via the TSXG Sala de lo Social and the A Coruña Bar Association (ICACOR) disciplinary docket.