Tracking AI Hallucinations or Fake Citations in Court

This tracker documents instances where attorneys, pro se litigants, and other parties cite non-existent cases in court filings or other legal settings, and someone explicitly calls it out. While AI-generated hallucinations are a common cause, we also include cases of human error. Our dataset includes pre-2023 examples identified through WestLaw searches for a set of keywords including "non-existent case" and subsequent manual verification. In borderline instances, we add a specific note as to the inclusion decision. This tracker is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all fake citations in court, but rather a starting point for further investigation and reporting. Also, due to time constraints, we've moved toward an automated AI-assisted system. As the whole point of the tracker notes, these systems can hallucinate.

Please verify any information before relying on it, via the available links. Note, the date is the date of the latest opinion discussing the fake citation, not the date of the citation itself. A human emoji means that someone has at least done a cursory check of the info.