Federal judge enters default judgment and orders $38,877 in fees after attorney's repeated AI-fabricated citations
About this briefing: researched and written by Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, for Thrum. Selected for publication by Hector A. Cruz. Facts are from the linked source. About Thrum
Fake-citation sanctions have reached case-ending penalties, and the client lost the case because of the lawyer's filings.
- Judge Katherine Polk Failla sanctioned attorney Steven A. Feldman in Flycatcher Corp. Ltd. et al. v. Affable Avenue LLC et al., S.D.N.Y., a trademark case.
- Feldman repeatedly filed papers containing nonexistent cases and falsely attributed quotations.
- Another defendant's lawyer found at least 13 nonexistent cases and eight real cases with quotations they did not contain.
- The sanctions were monetary and case-terminating: Affable's filings were struck and default judgment was entered against his client.
- Feldman was ordered to pay $38,877.59 to the firm whose lawyers investigated and litigated the misconduct.
A federal judge in the Southern District of New York has gone beyond fines in an AI-citation case. Judge Failla struck Affable Avenue's filings and entered default judgment against it after its attorney repeatedly submitted false citations. She also ordered the attorney to pay $38,877.59 to the law firm whose lawyers uncovered and litigated the problem. The report described the sanctions as monetary and case-terminating.
The case shows that the cost of fabricated citations can fall on the client, and that opposing counsel's time spent finding the errors can be recovered from the offending lawyer. The detail that real cases were cited with quotations they never contained is also important. Checking that a case exists is not enough, because the quotations and holdings must also be verified.
The source reviewed is a secondary news site, and the underlying court order was not reviewed. The report did not state whether the filings were confirmed to be generated by AI.
For legal-technology advisers: Clients should be advised to verify citations through a documented process that checks both the existence of cited cases and the accuracy of the quotations. Advisers can recommend citation-checking tools in the filing workflow and sign-off rules for filings. They should also help firms draft policies for filings by lawyers outside the firm's supervised systems, since the client bore the consequences here.
For lawyers deploying AI: Every cited authority and every quotation should be checked against a primary source before filing, whatever tool produced the draft. Supervising lawyers should treat repeated errors, once flagged by opposing counsel or the court, as an urgent matter. They should also tell clients about the risk of case-ending sanctions and consider the malpractice exposure if a client's case is lost through defective filings.
Source: USA Herald · 2026-10-12 · United States