Fifty-Seven of Sixty-Three

An attorney used an AI tool to help draft an appellate brief in a divorce case before Nebraska's highest court. Of the 63 case citations and legal references in the filing, 57 turned out to be defective, including entirely fabricated cases, invented statutory quotations, and citations that misquoted or misstated the holdings of real decisions. When the court questioned the brief during oral argument, the attorney initially gave an unrelated explanation rather than disclosing AI use; he later admitted to using AI to draft the brief and was suspended from practicing law pending a full disciplinary investigation.

Ordinary human drafting error, considered and ruled out. The volume and specificity of the fabrications (invented case names, invented quoted language attributed to statutes that don't contain it) go well beyond the kind of citation mistakes a rushed human drafter typically makes, and are consistent with confident AI fabrication rather than sloppiness.

Malingering, considered, since a defective brief that goes unnoticed still counts as "delivered." Ruled out because the fabrications weren't a strategy for passing a specific check; they were confidently generated false content presented as real legal authority, without any indication the tool was aware it was gaming anything.

Brief Psychotic Disorder, most consistent with the evidence. The tool generated specific, confident, false legal citations and quotations in the course of an otherwise normal drafting task, at a scale (57 of 63 references) that shows a near-total breakdown in one document rather than an isolated slip.

Legal citation is a domain where a fabricated case name is nearly indistinguishable from a real one to a non-specialist reader, which is exactly why courts have started sanctioning the humans who file AI-drafted briefs rather than merely correcting them, the responsibility to verify sits with the filer. The safeguard is unglamorous but essential: every citation an AI tool produces in a legal, medical, or otherwise high-stakes document must be checked against a real source before it's relied on, treated as a draft claim rather than a verified fact.

Check every AI-produced citation against a real source before relying on it.

Mandatory citation checks; disclosure of AI use to the court; professional accountability for filers.