AI Horror Stories (And How to Avoid Your Own)
This Halloween, three real court cases haunt the profession. California, Illinois, and Alabama attorneys using general-purpose AI platforms faced career-damaging consequences—preventable with legal-specific AI and proper verification.
This Halloween, we’re serving up something truly terrifying for legal professionals: horror stories based on real attorneys who fell victim to AI hallucinations.
These aren’t merely ghost stories told around a campfire. They’re dramatized accounts of documented cases from California, Illinois, and Alabama courts—cautionary tales of professional nightmares brought on by irresponsible AI use.
As you read these three chilling accounts, remember that every courtroom disaster could have been prevented. The fatal flaw wasn’t in using AI. It was in how they used it.
Murky Case Law and Dark Consequences
It started innocently enough. An attorney in Los Angeles, drowning in deadlines and case files, discovered what seemed like salvation: ChatGPT, a general-purpose and widely available AI platform, could “enhance” his drafted appellate briefs. He fed it his notes, and AI spun back eloquent prose studded with case citations—Schimmel v. Levin, Regency Health Services, Peake v. Underwood—each one seemingly perfect for his position.
That’s where his nightmare began.
He never read the cases. He never read the AI-enhanced briefs…then he filed them with the California Court of Appeal.
While the attorney never read the cases—the judge did. And what the judge found made her blood run cold.
Twenty-one out of twenty-three quotations in his opening brief were fabricated. The quotes didn’t exist. The cases said different things entirely. Some cases didn’t exist at all—phantoms in the night. The sheer unreliability of general-purpose AI had manifested as professional incompetence. The reply brief was even worse, riddled with more hallucinations, more ghosts of cases never decided, and more cursed principles of law never written.
The court issued an Order to Show Cause. Surely, they thought, there must be a reasonable explanation for this horrible mistake.
At oral argument, the attorney confessed: He’d written initial drafts, let ChatGPT “enhance” them, then filed them without reading anything—not the cases and not even his own briefs.
The icy grip of fear enveloped the attorney as he stood before the judge, whose scalding admonishment loomed ever closer.
The court sanctioned him $10,000, the highest fine ever issued by a California state court for AI misuse. They ordered the opinion served on his client, so she would know what her lawyer had done. They referred him to the State Bar for potential discipline. And they published their decision as a warning of “the darker consequences of AI” to every attorney in California.
Later, speaking to the press, the attorney reflected on the shattered glass of his reputation: “We’re going to have some victims, we’re going to have some damages, we’re going to have some wreckages. I hope this example will help others not fall into the hole. I’m paying the price."
Are you sure you read what you’re about to file?
The Perfect Storm of Poor Lawyering
The dark clouds had been gathering for months. A seasoned public defender felt them closing in—deadlines crashing like waves against the shore, and case files stacking like thunderheads on the horizon. His client needed an appellate brief. The court needed citations. And the public defender needed time he didn’t have.
That’s when lightning struck—an idea so tempting, so seemingly simple: Let AI write it for me.
He fed his prompt into a general-purpose AI platform. The platform conjured an output studded with case citations—In re R.D.S., In re M.F., In re Brandon E.—each one seemingly perfect for his arguments. Eight cases in total, their quotes precise and persuasive.
The public defender never read the cases. The storm of deadlines was too fierce, the temptation too great. He hit “file” and moved on to the next crisis.
Then the sky fell.
The Appellate Court of Illinois began investigating. Five cases didn’t exist at all—apparitions conjured by AI hallucinations. Three cases were real, but were misidentified and cited incorrectly. None supported the propositions he claimed.
When the court summoned him to explain, the public defender confessed. His words echoed like thunder through the courtroom: He’d used AI to draft the brief. He’d been “extremely busy.” It was a “perfect storm” of “temptation of AI out there at a time when [he] was busy and trying to meet deadlines.”
He admitted it “might be an example of poor lawyering, poor arguing, stretching principles.” He acknowledged he “barely did any personal work [him]self on this appeal.”
The consequences crashed down with the force of a tidal wave. His $6,925.62 fee was disgorged along with $1,000 in sanctions. He was referred to the disciplinary commission. His 56-year career was tarnished with a published opinion warning every attorney in Illinois about the dangers of irresponsible AI use.
The storm had passed, but the public defender was left in wreckage of its wake.
When the perfect storm of deadlines and pressure strikes your practice, will you reach for general-purpose AI and file without reading—or will you use a legal-specific platform and verify every case?
The Siren Call of Unverified AI
The email sat in the supervising attorney’s inbox at 2:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning. A junior associate had sent another draft motion—this one defending a lawsuit against the Commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections. The motion needed legal support, and the supervisor knew exactly where to find it.
He opened ChatGPT, a general-purpose AI platform not designed for the precision legal work demands, and typed his query. Within seconds, the screen filled with perfect citations: United States v. Baker, Kelley v. City of Birmingham, Greer v. Warden—each one seemingly supporting their position flawlessly.
The supervisor copied the citations, pasted them into the motion, and sent it back to the associate. Neither of them read a single case. Neither of them verified a single citation. The motion was filed with the court, and three attorneys signed their names to the document.
Then came the plaintiff’s response, and with it, a chilling revelation: The citations were fabricated. Some cases existed but said nothing about discovery. Some cited the wrong cases entirely. Others were complete fantasies—judicial opinions that had never been written.
A federal judge ordered all three attorneys to appear and show cause why they shouldn’t be sanctioned.
At the hearing, the truth emerged. The supervising attorney had violated his own firm’s policy surrounding AI use. The junior attorney who filed the motions “simply assumes that other people verify citations.” The practice group leader, responsible for public contracts allocating taxpayer dollars, reviewed nothing—he trusted that someone else would check.
Each reprimand by the court was a clean, deep incision: This was “an extreme dereliction of professional responsibility” and “lazy, convenient fictions” substituting for truth. The court found their conduct was “recklessness in the extreme, and it is tantamount to bad faith.” The judge warned that “any sanctions discount would amplify the siren call of unverified AI for lawyers who are already confident in their legal conclusion.”
All three attorneys were publicly reprimanded, disqualified from the case, and referred to the State Bar. The firm was forced to review every filing in 52 federal cases spanning two years. And the public—whose tax dollars paid these lawyers—watched in horror as the legal system absorbed the waste of incompetent supervision and irresponsible AI use.
When you hear the siren call of general-purpose AI promising quick citations, will you resist, will you verify—or will you become the next cautionary tale?
How to Avoid Your Own AI Horror Story
What haunts each of these cautionary tales? Two fatal decisions that turned promising technology into career-damaging nightmares:
First, they used general-purpose AI platforms like ChatGPT—systems designed for everyday tasks, not the exacting standards of legal research. These conversational AI assistants weren’t engineered with legal databases or verified case law in mind.
Second, none of them verified their citations. They trusted blindly. They filed without reading. They assumed someone else would check.
These judges weren’t anti-AI. They were anti-irresponsible AI use.
The California Court of Appeal made it clear: “Although there is nothing inherently wrong with an attorney appropriately using AI in a law practice—before filing any court document, an attorney must carefully check every case citation, fact, and argument to make sure that they are correct and proper.” The disasters are “entirely preventable by competent counsel who do their jobs properly and competently.”
The Illinois Appellate Court agreed: “To be clear, nothing in this opinion is intended to categorically forbid attorneys from using AI tools—in fact, the Illinois Supreme Court AI policy explicitly permits the use of AI. However, attorneys must use AI tools wisely.”
Use AI Engineered for Lawyers
Legal-specific AI platforms, like Vincent, were built to prevent these horror stories. Unlike general-purpose platforms, Vincent grounds every response in the vLex legal database, containing over 1 billion verified legal documents spanning case law, statutes, and regulations.
When Vincent cites a case, it’s citing actual law from a verified database, not generating text based on predictive patterns. This architectural difference dramatically reduces hallucination risk.
Verify AI’s Outputs
You must always read every case you submit to a court. Vincent provides direct hyperlinks to every cited source in the vLex database. Click the link, and you’re reading the actual case—no searching, no PACER fees, no wondering if it’s real. When verification takes seconds, there’s no excuse for filing unread cases.
Practice Responsible AI Use
Courts take AI misuse seriously, and often issue sanctions, State Bar referrals, and published opinions naming and shaming the attorneys involved. But these consequences are preventable if you use a legal-specific AI platform, verify every citation, and read what you sign your name to.
This Halloween, try Vincent for free and banish hallucinations from your practice.
Authored by
Sierra Van Allen
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