Invented Citations and Why They End Careers

The authority that looks perfect and does not exist

Ask a chat AI tool for cases supporting a proposition and you will usually get some. They will look right. The party names will sound like real litigants. The citation will be in the format your jurisdiction uses. There may be a year, a court, a page reference and a short quotation from the judgment that says exactly what you hoped it would say.

Some of them will not exist.

Not "will be distinguishable" or "will have been overturned on appeal". Will not exist. No such case, no such judgment, no such passage. Or the case exists but is about something else entirely, and the quotation appears nowhere in it.

Lawyers in several jurisdictions have faced serious professional consequences for filing documents containing citations of exactly this kind. The details differ and this course does not name them, but the pattern is consistent: a plausible authority went into a court document without anyone reading the source, and the court found out before the lawyer did.

Why it happens

A language model produces text that is likely to follow the text before it. When you ask for an authority, it produces a very good imitation of what an authority for that proposition would look like. That is a different task from retrieving a record from a law report or a legal database, and the model is not doing the second thing unless it has been connected to a search tool and has actually used it.

So an invented case is not the system malfunctioning. It is the system doing what it always does, applied to a question that needed a library. The output is fluent because fluency is its strength. Accuracy about the world is a separate matter.

This is why "but it was so specific" is no comfort. Specificity costs the model nothing. A correctly formatted citation, a paragraph number and a crisp quotation are as easy to generate as a vague sentence, and much more convincing.

The rule

Never file, send or rely on any authority, quotation or statement of law that you have not read in the primary source.

That rule survives every future improvement in these tools. Reading the source means: the case or provision exists, the citation is correct, it says what you are attributing to it, it is still good law so far as your normal research methods show, and the quotation appears in it word for word. If you cannot confirm all of that, it does not go in.

The rule also applies to work that reaches you from someone else. A draft from a junior colleague, a note from opposing counsel, a memo from a client's in-house team: if you are relying on an authority in it, you check it, whoever or whatever produced the draft.

Your courts and your regulator may also have specific requirements about AI use in documents put before them, including whether you must disclose it. Those vary and change. Check the current rules and guidance for each court and regulator you deal with.

Use it for search terms and structure, not authorities

This does not make AI useless for research. It changes what you ask for. Do not ask it for authorities. Ask it to help you think about how to search, and then do the searching in the primary sources and research services you already trust.

I am researching this issue: [describe it in neutral terms].
Do not give me any cases, citations, quotations or statements
of what the law is.
Give me:

The legal concepts and terms of art likely to be relevant
Two or three alternative ways of framing the issue
The types of primary and secondary source I should check
Ten search queries I could run in a legal research database
Questions I should answer before I can frame the issue properly

Structure is the other safe use. Once you have found and read your authorities, AI can help you arrange an argument you have already built, suggest a logical order for headings, or point out where a step in your reasoning is not yet supported. You supply the substance. It helps with the shape.

If you already have a list

If a list of authorities has come from a chat window, treat every item as unverified. Look each one up in a primary source. If you cannot find it, assume it does not exist and move on. For those you can find, read the relevant passage, confirm it says what you were told, and take the citation from the source, not from the chat.