"You cited a hallucinated case." Now what?
Correct the record yourself, in writing, before anyone makes you. Rule 3.3(a)(1) puts the duty on you from the moment you learn of it. The published California sanctions run from $1,500 to $10,000, and what separates them is mostly how the lawyer behaved after the email arrived.
- Duty to correct
- Rule 3.3(a)(1), and Bus. & Prof. Code 6068(d) by statute Runs from knowledge. There is no motion you have to wait for
- Certification
- CCP 128.7(b) for the filing, CCP 128.5 for bad-faith tactics On appeal, CCP 907 and rule 8.276(a)(4), plus rule 8.204(a)(1)(B)
- Published sanctions so far
- $1,500 to $10,000, payable to the clerk, personally Plus a struck brief in one case, and a lost fee award for the side that did not catch it
- State Bar referral
- Automatic. The clerk must forward any sanctions opinion Bus. & Prof. Code 6086.7(a)(3). Nobody exercises discretion over this
- Self-report
- Any judicial sanction over $1,000, within 30 days Bus. & Prof. Code 6068(o)(3). Calendar it the day the order issues
- Not required, yet
- No California Rule of Court requires you to disclose AI use or certify that you checked the citations Proposed rule amendments closed for comment 4 May 2026 and are not adopted
The AI did not do this to you
The email arrives from opposing counsel, or worse, from the court: a case in your brief does not exist. Before anything else, hear the uncomfortable part. The AI did not do this to you. You did this by signing a brief without reading the authorities in it. Every signature on a California filing certifies, after "an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances," that the legal contentions are warranted by existing law (CCP 128.7(b)). A case that does not exist is not existing law, and no reasonable inquiry stops short of pulling the case.
The Second District said it plainly in Noland v. Land of the Free, L.P. (2025) 114 Cal.App.5th 426: it is a fundamental duty of attorneys to read the legal authorities they cite, and that duty cannot be delegated to AI or any other technology. Call it a workflow failure if it helps. The court will call it what it is. Nobody hallucinated on your behalf. You skipped the checking step because checking is slow, and slow is the job.
This is survivable
How you handle the next 48 hours matters more than the mistake itself.
The lawyers who fared worst in the published decisions denied, minimized, blamed clerical error, or corrected at the last possible moment. The factors courts have credited in mitigation are the opposite: prompt acknowledgment, remorse, and self-reporting. So take a breath, then get to work.
The rules you are now dealing with
Four layers apply, and they overlap.
Candor to the tribunal
Rule of Professional Conduct 3.3(a)(1) prohibits knowingly making a false statement of law to a tribunal "or fail[ing] to correct a false statement of material fact or law previously made." Rule 3.3(a)(2) separately prohibits knowingly misquoting a decision. Business and Professions Code section 6068(d) imposes the same duty by statute: employ "those means only as are consistent with truth." The word "knowingly" will not save you once you have been told the citation is fake. From the moment you learn of it, silence becomes the violation. The duty to correct is yours, and it runs now.
Certification
CCP 128.7 sanctions are available for the filing itself, and CCP 128.5 reaches bad-faith or frivolous tactics. On appeal, CCP 907 and California Rules of Court, rule 8.276(a)(4) do the same work. Courts have also invoked rule 8.204(a)(1)(B), which requires each point to be supported by citation of authority, and even rule 8.1115(a), on the theory that a nonexistent case is at best an uncitable unpublished one (People v. Alvarez (2025) 114 Cal.App.5th 1115).
Competence
The State Bar's COPRAC Practical Guidance on generative AI (November 2023, updated 2026) grounds verification in Rules 1.1 and 1.3: AI output is a starting point that must be critically reviewed, and overreliance is inconsistent with the active practice of law. In Del Biaggio v. Bansen (2026), the First District held that even a described protocol for "human verification of all outputs" was not enough where counsel had not personally read the principal authority his argument relied on.
What does not yet exist
No California Rule of Court currently requires attorneys to disclose AI use in filings or to certify AI citation checking. The Fourth District flagged that gap in In re Domestic Partnership of Torres Campos & Munoz (2026) 118 Cal.App.5th 1112 and recommended the Judicial Council adopt verification rules. The State Bar has proposed amendments to six Rules of Professional Conduct, including 1.1 and 3.3, that would require lawyers to independently review and verify every AI output used in a representation. The comment period closed 4 May 2026; nothing is adopted yet. Rule of Court 10.430, effective 1 September 2025, governs the courts' own internal AI use, not yours.
What courts have actually done
The published 2025 and 2026 decisions give you the range.
| Case | What happened |
|---|---|
| Noland v. Land of the Free, L.P. (2025) 114 Cal.App.5th 426 | 21 of 23 quotations in the opening brief were fabricated. $10,000 payable to the clerk, personally, counsel ordered to serve the opinion on his own client, and the opinion forwarded to the State Bar. The court called $10,000 conservative. It also declined to award fees to the respondent, because respondent's counsel never caught the fakes either. |
| Shayan v. Shakib (2025) 116 Cal.App.5th 619 | $7,500, opening brief struck, corrected brief required. The court did not care whether the fabrications came from AI or from "an editing process." The duty is the same. |
| Schlichter v. Kennedy (2025) 116 Cal.App.5th 24 | $1,750. Counsel claimed clerical error unrelated to AI. The court checked: real cases with those names existed, and none supported his propositions. The cover story cost more than the confession would have. |
| People v. Alvarez (2025) 114 Cal.App.5th 1115 | $1,500 and a State Bar referral in a criminal appeal, with the court noting the special gravity when a defendant's liberty rides on the brief. |
| Del Biaggio v. Bansen (2026) | $1,500 even though counsel sent a correction letter, because he sent it on the eve of oral argument. "Far from ideal." |
Two consequences follow automatically. Under Business and Professions Code section 6086.7(a)(3), the clerk must forward any sanctions opinion to the State Bar. And under section 6068(o)(3), you must self-report any judicial sanction over $1,000 within 30 days.
Standard 2.12 makes reproval the presumed discipline for a violation of section 6068(o), the reporting duty itself. A candor violation is not in that standard, and the Bar has started moving on these: in April 2026 it charged three California lawyers over AI-fabricated citations, and one stipulated to a one-year stayed suspension with a 30-day actual suspension, probation, and ten hours of technology-focused CLE. No California lawyer has been disbarred over a hallucinated cite. One has already taken a suspension.
Has any of this reduced the hallucinations?
No. Sanctions, publicity, and better models have not made the problem shrink. It has plateaued at a high level.
The tracking database maintained by researcher Damien Charlotin logged roughly 1,850 court decisions worldwide addressing AI-fabricated authority as of August 2026, about 1,280 of them American, and the pace has settled around 350 to 400 decisions a quarter. Most incidents now come from self-represented litigants, but lawyers still account for roughly four in ten. Newer models hallucinate less per query, and it has not mattered, because usage keeps growing and the failure was never really the tool. The failure is the unread case. That number will not improve until the checking step does.
The next 48 hours
- Pull every citation in the filing yourself. Not with AI. Every case, every quote, every pin cite, in the whole document, because where there is one there are usually more.
- Write the court before anyone makes you. Identify each bad citation, withdraw it, and correct the record. Rule 3.3 requires it, and timing drives outcomes. Del Biaggio teaches that a correction on the courthouse steps barely counts.
- Tell your client. In writing. Noland ordered counsel to serve the sanctions opinion on his own client; get ahead of that conversation.
- Notify your malpractice carrier. A sanctions motion or OSC is foreseeable, and late notice creates coverage problems you do not need.
- Do not invent a clerical-error story. Schlichter shows how that ends. Say what happened.
- Calendar the self-report. If sanctions over $1,000 issue, Business and Professions Code section 6068(o)(3) gives you 30 days.
- Fix the process, not just the brief. Nothing gets filed until a human being has read every cited case in the original. If that rule had existed last month, you would not be reading this.
What breaks if you get this wrong
Nothing here is jurisdictional. All of it is discretionary, which is the point: your conduct after the discovery is the variable.
The State Bar referral
If sanctions issue, the clerk forwards the opinion. Bus. & Prof. Code 6086.7(a)(3) gives nobody discretion to skip it, and a later correction does not unwind it.
Missing the 30-day self-report
A separate 6068(o)(3) violation on top of the underlying conduct, and the one with a presumed discipline attached to it.
The false statement itself
Rule 3.3 gives you the correction. Del Biaggio drew $1,500 despite a correction letter sent the night before argument. Same act, sent in week one, reads as mitigation.
Your brief
Shayan struck the opening brief and made counsel file a corrected one. On a jurisdictional filing deadline that is a different kind of problem.
Your name in a published opinion
Every one of these decisions names the lawyer. The $1,500 is not the expensive part.
One more reason to check everything, every time: Noland suggests the duty now runs in both directions. Respondent's counsel there lost a fee award because they never noticed the appellant's citations were fake. Reading the cases is the job when you write the brief, and it is the job when you read the other side's.
This page addresses California law current as of August 2026. It is general information, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by reading it. Rules, published decisions, and local practice change; verify everything against current authority, which is rather the point.