The Citation Check That Passes When It Should Fail

Run this scenario.

An attorney uses an AI tool to research a brief. The tool cites four appellate cases. The attorney runs a citation check. All four cases resolve. The docket numbers are valid. The courts are real.

The brief gets filed. The court flags the citations. The problem: the quoted language attributed to those cases does not appear in any of those opinions. The AI generated quotations from real cases that do not contain those quotations.

This happened in Miller v. Regions Bank (N.D. Ala., May 2026). The attorney was sanctioned, suspended, referred to disciplinary authorities, and ordered to distribute the opinion to every client and opposing counsel in all his current matters.

His citation check passed. His check was the wrong check.

Two ways AI fails with legal citations

The legal profession has catalogued over 1,300 documented AI citation failures in court filings. Most discussion treats them as one category: "AI hallucinated a citation." Courts are beginning to distinguish between two different failure modes, and the distinction matters for what verification can catch.

The first failure mode is fabrication. The AI generates a citation to a case that does not exist. The docket number is invented. The case name resolves to nothing. A basic citation check catches this immediately.

The second failure mode is misattribution. The AI cites a real case for a proposition that case does not support, or quotes language that does not appear in the opinion. The citation resolves perfectly. The case exists. The court is real. Everything passes a resolution check. The only way to discover the failure is to open the opinion and read the paragraph.

These are different problems. They require different checks.

What the cases show

In Quinteros v. Harbor Distributing (Cal. Ct. App., June 2026, published), the court found two failures of the first kind and eight of the second. Eight fabricated quotations from five real cases. The contract attorney claimed to have run a citation check three separate times. If true, that check caught nothing: the five real cases with fabricated quotations resolved cleanly.Sources: Quinteros v. Harbor Distributing (Cal. Ct. App.)

In Whiting v. City of Athens (6th Cir., March 2026), the court distinguished between fabricated citations and citations that "lacked the language quoted in the brief" and "failed to support the cited proposition." The opinion names both failure modes separately.Sources: Whiting v. City of Athens (6th Cir.)

In El Bitar v. Hernandez (W.D. Wash., June 2026), Google Gemini fabricated quotations from two real Ninth Circuit immigration cases. "Neither case supported the proposition cited, and the quoted language existed nowhere in either opinion." The cases existed. The citations resolved. The quotations did not.

What verification requires

A first-level check confirms that a cited source exists. This is automatable. Most citation-checking tools do this well. It catches fabricated case names, invented docket numbers, cases attributed to the wrong jurisdiction.

A second-level check confirms that the proposition attributed to a source is actually in that source. This is not automatable in the same way. It requires a practitioner to open the opinion, find the section, and confirm that the quoted language or attributed holding is there.

Courts are beginning to specify which level they expect. The phrase "personally read and verified," appearing in an increasing number of standing orders and sanctions opinions, implies the second-level check. "Verified" means the proposition holds, not merely that the case exists.

The governance implication

Law firms adopting AI into drafting workflows are managing a verification problem more complex than "check that citations are real." The first-level check is easy to build into a process. The second-level check requires a deliberate protocol: for every citation in an AI-assisted brief, a named practitioner confirms that the attributed language or holding is actually present in that opinion.

The current wave of sanctions involves practitioners who completed neither check, or only the first. As tooling improves, the cases that remain will increasingly involve practitioners who completed the first check and missed the second.

That is the failure mode courts are beginning to isolate. It is worth understanding before a sanctions order makes the distinction for you.