Withers v. City of Aberdeen: a federal court sanctions attorneys on BOTH sides $8,000 for AI-hallucinated citations

The problem

Withers v. City of Aberdeen is a breach-of-contract dispute over legal fees between Louisiana attorney Tom Withers III and the City of Aberdeen, Mississippi. During summary-judgment briefing, counsel on both sides independently used generative-AI tools to research and draft their memoranda and filed briefs citing cases that do not exist. The court, unable to locate the cited authorities, identified three tainted filings — a City summary-judgment memorandum, a City memorandum challenging the reasonableness of Withers’s fee accounting, and Withers’s opposition to the City’s summary-judgment motion — and issued a show-cause order. The court called it “an unusual scenario—attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct.”

What was built

No system was built and no outcome was delivered — this is an AI-governance honest-negative. Two out-of-state attorneys drove the AI use: Kathryn Y. Williams (for the City) admitted using an AI tool to conduct legal research and incorporating the output without verification, and Kathleen M. Wilson (for Withers) admitted using a generative-AI drafting program she identified as “First Drafts” — “an AI-powered program for drafting legal documents” — again without verifying the output. The order names no tool for Williams. Both local counsel, Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway and Mark C. McClinton, signed the filings without reviewing them. The court framed the lesson in terms every buyer of legal AI should hear: generative technology “cannot attach … sincerity, truth, or responsibility to what it writes. That remains the sacred duty of the lawyer who signs the page.”

The outcome

In a Sanctions Order filed June 8, 2026 (Doc. #123), U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock sanctioned all four attorneys under Rule 11, the court’s Local Rules and its inherent authority:

Attorney	Role	Monetary fine	Other
Kathleen M. Wilson	Plaintiff, out-of-state counsel (drafter)	$2,500	Pro hac vice revoked; 2-year district bar; AI-ethics CLE
Kathryn Y. Williams	City, out-of-state counsel (drafter)	$3,500	Pro hac vice revoked; 2-year district bar
Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway	Plaintiff, local counsel	$1,000	Disqualified from the case
Mark C. McClinton	City, local counsel	$1,000	Disqualified from the case

All fines are payable to the registry of the court within 30 days — $8,000 in total. The court directed the Clerk to send copies of the order to the Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas Bars, stayed the case and cancelled the trial that had been set for March 23, 2026. Every figure is quoted verbatim from the signed order, which is byte-identical to a Wayback-archived copy and corroborated by two archive-bound independent newsrooms (Reason/The Volokh Conspiracy and The Legal Wire).

Path to green

The dollar figures, bars, disqualifications and CLE are established by the signed federal order and need no client-confirmation call. A green badge (if TIN carries court-adjudicated honest-negatives) is a human confirming the docket’s compliance posture: whether each fine was paid into the registry within 30 days; whether new counsel appeared by August 7, 2026 or the case was dismissed; any Mississippi/Louisiana/Texas Bar disciplinary outcome; and whether any attorney sought reconsideration or appeal. Docket: N.D. Miss. No. 1:24-CV-218-SA-RP.