From Doe v. Univ. of N.C. Sys. , decided today by Chief Judge Martin Reidlinger (W.D.N.C.):
On November 10, 2025, the Court ordered the Plaintiff's counsel to show cause as to why they should not be sanctioned for the many errors in the documents they submitted to the Court, including: (1) citing two cases that do not appear to exist ( i.e. , hallucinated citations); (2) quoting material that does not exist in the cases purportedly quoted ( i.e. , hallucinated quotations); (3) mischaracterizing holdings of cited cases; (4) citing cases that have no bearing on the proposition for which they were cited; and (5) failing to provide pinpoint citations and information identifying the courts from which opinions issued.
On November 19, 2025, during a hearing on the show cause order, the Plaintiff's counsel admitted these errors and explained that, in large part, the errors resulted from misuse of artificial intelligence software (including a misunderstanding of how to properly use artificial intelligence) and a failure to verify the outputs of artificial intelligence software, even though the Plaintiff's counsel had signed certifications stating that they had verified every statement and every citation in the documents they submitted to the Court. The Plaintiff's counsel expressed remorse and offered to write an article for the state bar journal explaining their errors and the potential pitfalls of misusing artificial intelligence. The Court agreed that such an article—"an article that essentially says, we really screwed up and we almost got put under the jail, don't fall into the pit that we did"—could help other lawyers wake up to the seriousness of attorney misuse of artificial intelligence. The Court has refrained from discharging the show cause order pending counsel's preparation of the article.
The Plaintiff's counsel submitted their proposed article to the North Carolina State Bar Journal, and it has now been published. Fred W. DeVore III and Rob Wilder, Guarding Against AI Errors: Ethical Risks for NC Attorneys , N.C. State Bar J. 1, 8-12 (Summer 2026) (hereinafter "the Article"). Now before the Court is the issue of whether this Article is sufficient to purge the show cause order and the proposed contempt/sanctions that arose from counsel's errors.
The Court is compelled to express its disappointment in that the Article falls short of the Court's expectations based on what counsel proposed at the November 19, 2025 hearing. The Plaintiff's counsel were less than fully forthcoming in the Article about the scope of their errors in this matter. The Plaintiff's counsel had submitted five documents—two motion briefs and three briefs in opposition—with citation errors of all sorts. After the Defendant's counsel brought attention to some of the errors, the Plaintiff's counsel used their two reply briefs to address their errors rather than further their client's case. As a result, the Plaintiff's counsel's errors undermined their own advocacy, hindered the work of their opposing counsel, and wasted significant time and resources of the Court. Yet, the Article fails to fully acknowledge the impact of such errors, both on the litigation itself as well as their reputation as attorneys. If the purpose of the Article is to keep other attorneys from "falling into the pit," one must accurately describe "the pit." Counsel's efforts failed to fully achieve that objective.
In addition, counsel's Article reflects a failure to fully appreciate the severity of counsel's errors. The Plaintiff's counsel recount their experience in a mere three paragraphs, accounting for a small fraction of the article. In doing so, their errors were unduly minimized. For example, one attorney writes: "The cases I cited were correct, but the quotes were hallucinated. I checked the cases but not the quotes." A cited case is not "correct," nor has a case been "checked," unless the attorney has verified that the case contains the quote or supports the proposition for which the case is cited. When an attorney presents a document to the Court, an attorney certifies "to the best of the [attorney's] knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances" that the document complies with the substantive provisions of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. An inquiry that does not involve verifying quotes is never reasonable under the circumstances.
In another instance, one of the attorneys writes that he "signed a certification that [he] did not use AI to write the brief, which was true, but [he] failed to verify the authenticity" of sources that he received from other attorneys, i.e. , attorneys who were not attorneys of record in the case. That is not, however, what he certified. This Court's Standing Order on the Use of Artificial Intelligence, requires every statement and every citation to an authority contained in a document to be "checked by any attorney and/or a paralegal working at his/her dir…
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