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, resolved in Auto 00061/2026 on the appeal 5472/2025 (source). 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” (source). The lawyer acknowledged the facts and apologised, but “no ha ofrecido explicación suficiente sobre … la herramienta empleada (qué IA utilizó)” (source).

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” (source). It stressed that using generative tools demands both ex-ante evaluation and ex-post verification of the output, a “reserva de humanidad”, and held the failure to check the citations a breach of “el principio de buena fe procesal consagrado en el artículo 75.4” LJS (source). The order names no specific AI product used by the lawyer, which the court itself noted as a gap in his explanation (source).

The outcome

The fine, imposed on the lawyer personally: €1,800 under article 75.4 LJS, which permits fines of €600 to €6,000 for a breach of good-faith procedural conduct (source). The court also ordered “se dará traslado al Ilustre Colegio de Abogados de A Coruña (ICACOR) a los efectos disciplinarios que procedan”, a referral to the A Coruña Bar Association for possible disciplinary proceedings (source).

How the court sized it: a 3x multiplier on the €600 floor. Distinctively, the court sized the fine to the cost of the remedy: verified legal-AI subscriptions from the main Spanish legal publishers carry annual plans that in basic tiers run roughly €1,500 to €3,000 (Sof-IA de Tirant, GenIA-L de Lefebvre, K+ de Aranzadi, Vicent AI de vLex, Prudencia.ai or Harvey AI), any of which, or the free CENDOJ database, would have prevented the result now judged (source). It set €1,800, weighing the lawyer’s admission of the facts and lack of prior record as mitigating factors (source).

How this was verified

This is an honest-negative, court-origin AI-governance record, not a client testimonial, and no green badge is sought. Every figure rests on the published order of the Tribunal Superior de Xustiza de Galicia, Auto 00061/2026 (a tier-1 independent adjudicator), retrieved via the Charlotin AI-hallucination re-host and byte-tied (sha1-b32 OZENRYNGCJRF6VK2JVGXDPQHNA2THZSG) to a Wayback capture of 2026-07-25. On 2026-08-18 the €1,800 fine, the 24-of-32 fabricated-citation finding, the article 75.4 LJS basis and its €600 to €6,000 range, the ICACOR referral, and the €1,500 to €3,000 subscription calibration were each re-confirmed live against three independent Spanish newsrooms that quote the order firsthand: Economist & Jurist, Galicia Press and Confilegal. The one figure the order itself leaves open is the AI product used: the court records that the lawyer never said which tool he used, so this page names none. The facts could be independently re-checked via the TSXG Sala de lo Social and the A Coruña Bar Association (ICACOR) disciplinary docket.

Related case files

The same civil-law-Europe reasoning, that an AI-assisted brief is the signing lawyer’s sole responsibility, drives Italy’s Corte di Cassazione €5,000 sanction, where the court framed the duty as “diligenza digitale” rather than the TSXG’s “reserva de humanidad”. The Czech Constitutional Court’s 25,000 CZK fine is the closest European sibling: a lawyer sanctioned for fabricated citations at the top of a national court hierarchy. And the near-identical fabrication ratio recurs in Kruse v. Karlen, where 22 of 24 citations were fake, showing the TSXG’s 24-of-32 is a pattern, not an outlier.

Sources

Tier 1 = the court’s own order; Tier 2 = independent press naming the parties and quoting the order firsthand. Figures re-checked live on 2026-08-18.

1. Tribunal Superior de Xustiza de Galicia, Sala de lo Social (A Coruña), “Auto 00061/2026, Recurso de Suplicación 5472/2025,” 2026-07-07 (Tier 1, the adjudicating court’s own order; retrieved via the Charlotin AI-hallucination re-host and byte-tied, sha1-b32 OZENRYNGCJRF6VK2JVGXDPQHNA2THZSG, to a Wayback capture of 2026-07-25). https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
2. Economist & Jurist, “El TSXG fija un antes y un después en el uso de la IA por los abogados: multa de 1.800 euros por presentar un recurso con jurisprudencia inventada,” 2026-07-15 (Tier 2, independent legal press quoting the order firsthand). https://www.economistjurist.es/actualidad-juridica/jurisprudencia/el-tsxg-fija-un-antes-y-un-despues-en-el-uso-de-la-ia-por-los-abogados-multa-de-1-800-euros-por-presentar-un-recurso-con-jurisprudencia-inventada/
3. Galicia Press, “El TSXG multa con 1.800 euros a un abogado gallego por un recurso lleno de sentencias inventadas por la IA,” 2026-07-15 (Tier 2, independent regional press). https://www.galiciapress.es/articulo/movimientos/2026-07-15/5954388-tsxg-multa-1800-euros-abogado-gallego-recurso-lleno-sentencias-inventadas-ia
4. Confilegal, “El TSXG fija el primer estándar judicial sobre el uso de la IA por los abogados,” 2026-07-21 (Tier 2, independent legal press). https://confilegal.com/20260721-el-tsxg-fija-el-primer-estandar-judicial-sobre-el-uso-de-la-ia-por-los-abogados/