The earliest matter this tracker codes as a sanction dates to 2023. As of October 9, 2026, the tracker codes 606 matters as a court sanction, bar discipline, or a formal warning: a filing contained AI-generated or suspected AI-generated material, and a court or disciplinary authority issued a final order. (Pending matters where a show-cause is open but no final ruling has issued are tracked separately.) This post reads the docket sideways. Patterns emerge by error type, by jurisdiction, by court action, and by dollar amount. Most are unsurprising once seen in aggregate.
Cases are the unit of analysis, not the lawyers. Names of individual attorneys appear only as links to the underlying case page, where the public record speaks for itself. Our framing is what firms can do to stay out of this database. It is not who already is in it.
Which AI tools the record names
The tracker records the AI tool as free text, usually with the court’s own qualifications, so this post does not count matters by tool. Many orders name no tool, and the AI attribution rests on the court’s findings or on inference. Others mention a product only as an example of generative AI, or repeat what the filer said without making a finding. A count by product name would mix those orders with the ones that identify the tool.
Where the record does name the tool, it is not limited to general-purpose chatbots. In United States v. Farris, No. 25-5623 (6th Cir. Apr. 3, 2026) (tracker entry), the Sixth Circuit traced appointed counsel’s principal brief to Westlaw’s CoCounsel through its file name.
In Creech v. City of Raleigh, No. COA25-513 (N.C. Ct. App.) (tracker entry), an appellate brief cited two cases that do not exist. Counsel’s sworn statement, filed with an October 21, 2025 Notice of Correction, traced them to a contract attorney’s research prepared in part with Vincent AI, a tool marketed for legal research. In an order entered November 3, 2025 (docket), the court struck the original brief, accepted an amended one, and taxed the cost of printing it to counsel personally. Its order does not mention AI or call that cost a sanction. Whatever marketing language a vendor uses, the duty under ABA Formal Opinion 512 sits with the filing attorney.
A firm AI policy that bans only ChatGPT misses the pattern. The risk is not the brand. It is the practice of citing a quotation, a holding, or a case caption without verifying the underlying source.
What kinds of errors trigger sanctions
The dominant error is the fabricated citation. A non-existent case is paired with a real legal proposition, and the filing attorney either did not check or did not know to check.
Adjacent errors visible across the docket:
- Invented quotations from real cases. The case is real. The quote is not. Westlaw and Lexis return the case as valid, so the quote check requires opening the opinion itself.
- Misattributed holdings. Real case, real holding, wrong proposition. Frequently produced when a tool summarizes an opinion the filing attorney has not read.
- Mismatched parallel citations. An accurate F.3d cite paired with a fabricated state-reporter cite. Bluebook formatting is technically correct, which is the giveaway. Human lawyers rarely pair accurate federal authority with a fabricated state pin cite.
- Fake statute or rule numbers. Less common but persistent. Filings argue rules of court that do not exist or cite statutes the legislature never enacted.
The error type that is conspicuously rare across the docket is the substantive misreading of an opinion the lawyer actually read. Models are weaker at retrieval than at analysis. Once given the right authority, the analysis is usually serviceable. The lesson, then: AI is not unfit for legal work. It is unfit for legal research in the narrow sense of locating authority that actually exists.
Two cases illustrate the retrieval failure. Mata v. Avianca is the canonical example. The filing cited six fabricated cases, opposing counsel raised the issue, and the SDNY issued a Rule 11 sanction. Park v. Kim is the Second Circuit follow-up that put attorneys on notice that the duty to verify is not new law. It is the existing duty under Federal Rule 11 applied to a new tool.
Where in the country it happens
Filings landed in courts spread across federal and state systems. The aggregator distinguishes the federal districts, state courts, and bankruptcy and specialty venues separately. The headline split: 433 matters in federal court, 173 in state court.
Top concentrations by state of the court of record. Only state courts and single-state federal districts are counted. Circuit cases that bind multiple states are excluded so a single appellate sanction does not inflate every state in the circuit:
- California with 69 matters
- New York with 58 matters
- Florida with 38 matters
- Texas with 30 matters
- Illinois with 21 matters
Read this list with two adjustments. First, the list counts matters, not rates. The tracker holds no data on how many filings each state’s courts receive, so a higher count does not by itself show a higher rate of AI errors. Second, published guidance makes the duty explicit. California’s Practical Guidance, Florida Bar Opinion 24-1 and Texas Opinion 705 address lawyers’ AI use directly, and New York’s 22 NYCRR Part 161 addresses AI in court papers. None of that guidance created the duty to verify citations, which predates AI. It states the duty in terms specific to the tool.
Pennsylvania needs a separate caution. Aggregator sites have propagated a “statewide August 2024 disclosure mandate” for the state. We have not located a primary source for that order (see the Pennsylvania page). Until one surfaces, treat the claim as unverified. Aggregator consensus is not validation.
What courts have done about it
Courts have used the full range of remedies available to them:
- Court-imposed sanctions are the most common outcome. The tracker codes 380 matters as court-imposed sanctions. The legal basis varies from order to order: Federal Rule 11, state analogues, and courts’ inherent authority all appear, and the count does not separate them. Not every such sanction is monetary; 179 matters across the dataset state a dollar amount (see “What it costs” below).
- 28 U.S.C. § 1927 fee-shifting is rarer but heavier. Courts award opposing counsel’s reasonable fees under Section 1927 on findings of unreasonable and vexatious conduct. Fee awards can dwarf any flat sanction.
- Striking the offending filing. Briefs disappear from the record. The case proceeds on what remains.
- Mandatory CLE. Several courts have ordered offending attorneys to complete remedial training on AI before further filings.
- Bar discipline and referrals. The tracker codes 10 matters in its bar discipline category, which holds discipline actually imposed by a disciplinary authority, or by a court acting in that role (suspension, public reprimand or censure, required restitution). A court’s referral to a disciplinary authority is not counted there. Where the court presents the referral as its sanction, or pairs it with one, the matter is counted as a court sanction; a referral the court does not call a sanction, with no disciplinary outcome yet recorded, falls outside these counts.
- Adverse inferences and credibility findings. Several judges have found that a fabricated cite undermines the credibility of every other representation in the filing. Downstream effects on the merits are harder to quantify.
- Pre-filing injunctions. Some orders bar offending attorneys from filing further documents in that court without pre-clearance.
- Disqualification and suspension. Uncommon, but on the record. In Rivera v. Triad Properties Corp., No. 2:24-cv-01802-AMM (N.D. Ala. Mar. 31, 2026), ECF No. 116 (tracker entry), the Northern District of Alabama suspended the filing attorney from practice in the district for three months and disqualified him and his firm from the case. The court found that the firm had paid for its lawyers’ AI use “all while having no internal policies or controls or guardrails in place to prevent AI abuse.” In Withers v. City of Aberdeen, No. 1:24-CV-218-SA-RP (N.D. Miss. June 8, 2026), ECF No. 123 (tracker entry), the Northern District of Mississippi disqualified local counsel on both sides, neither of whom had used AI, because they had signed the filings. The court acknowledged the burden on the clients, quoting an earlier decision: “even if there is some minor hardship, it must yield to the seriousness of the misconduct here.”
For ongoing court-level guidance, the court orders tracker lists the standing orders judges have issued requiring AI disclosure or verification on every filing.
What it costs
Among matters coded as court sanctions or in the bar discipline category whose recorded amount includes a parseable dollar figure, here are the headline numbers:
- Matters with a parseable dollar amount: 179
- Total across those matters: $1,246,972
- Median: $2,000
- Largest single amount: $110,204
Three reasons that total is a floor, not a ceiling.
First, many sanctions orders shift opposing counsel’s fees without quantifying the dollar figure inside the order. Fee awards land later on a supplemental affidavit and frequently do not appear in the order text the aggregator parses. Second, bar discipline (suspensions, restitution, referral fees) carries economic costs that do not map cleanly to a single dollar number. Third, the parser sums every dollar amount written into the sanction string. Where the order specifies ”+ $X each” per attorney without naming the count, the per-attorney multiplier is not applied, so totals understate multi-attorney joint-and-several sanctions.
A rough ladder, in ascending severity:
- Public admonishment, no monetary sanction. Court goes on the record but does not move money.
- Flat sanction, often in the low thousands of dollars. The median across matters with a stated amount is $2,000.
- Fee-shifting under Section 1927. Variable amount; five figures or more on contested motions is normal.
- Bar referral with disciplinary outcome. Suspension, public reprimand, and ancillary fees vary by state. Insurance and licensing consequences sit on top.
- Pre-filing injunction or vexatious-litigant designation. Procedural restriction; cost shows up as lost clients and inability to file in that court.
Brokers report that underwriters have started asking law firms about AI use at renewal. That development is the subject of Why Your Malpractice Carrier Is Starting to Ask About AI.
Practical reading
A managing partner who has read this far is asking the right question. Where does my firm sit in the distribution, and what would it cost to land in it?
Three lessons emerge from the docket.
One: the duty is old, even if the tool is new. Rule 11 has always required reasonable inquiry into citations. These cases prosecute the same duty against a new factual pattern. Firms with clean Rule 11 records need to extend existing verification practice to AI-assisted work, not invent a new compliance regime from scratch.
Two: disclosure rules vary by court. Getting disclosure wrong is a separate sanction risk from the underlying citation error. Our court orders tracker lists disclosure regimes by judge and by court. Filings that comply with the underlying duty but violate a disclosure rule still draw an order.
Three: the policy artifact matters at renewal even more than the policy itself. Firms with a written AI policy, an attorney acknowledgment file, a verification log, and an incident-response procedure have the documentation a malpractice carrier asks for. Firms that have only the practice but no documentation carry the same actual risk and a worse renewal posture. The Carrier-Renewal Packet, now in development, is built around those nine artifacts; the free resource library covers the same artifacts unbundled. For firms preferring a guided rollout, consulting runs vendor interviews, training, and carrier-submission prep.
A note on what is in the dataset
All case data is sourced from public court records: the federal PACER system, individual state court electronic filing portals, and the CourtListener RECAP archive. Case captions, judges, dates, and outcomes are checked against the docket entry before publication. Entries that have not been checked against a court record are held as drafts and left out of these counts.
Reversals propagate. If a sanction is later vacated, modified, or withdrawn on appeal, the case page updates and the aggregate counts in this post update on the next deploy. Manual editing of these counts is a regression. The dataset reflects what the public record shows on October 9, 2026.
No part of this post lists, ranks, or characterizes the conduct of any individual attorney. Across the database, framing is neutral reporting from court records under the fair-report privilege. Readers who believe a case page contains a factual error should send a correction notice; on receipt we verify against the docket and update the page promptly.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Verify all citations against primary sources, including the underlying court orders, before relying on them.