Avery v. Beauzil

What sanction did the court impose?

In a per curiam opinion on the order to show cause (Ciklin, Klingensmith and Lott, JJ.), the Fourth District found that the response "fails to show any cause why sanctions should not be imposed and, instead, convinces us that sanctions are necessary." Relying on the principle that a court may bar a litigant from appearing pro se when frivolous or excessive filings interfere with the timely administration of justice, the court directed the Clerk to reject any future filings by Avery unless signed by a member in good standing of The Florida Bar. It stated that, by separate order, it would require counsel to file a notice of appearance in his other pending cases in the court, or those cases will be dismissed. The court rejected his argument that the Americans with Disabilities Act licensed the filings, stating "we reject the notion that the ADA grants petitioner a license to abuse judicial process." The mandamus and prohibition petition in No. 4D2026-0406 and the certiorari petition and emergency request in No. 4D2026-0921 had been denied in the court's earlier order, which also directed him to show cause. No monetary sanction was imposed.

Why does Avery v. Beauzil matter for law firms using AI?

Avery v. Beauzil is a pro se filing-restriction order, and the Fourth District made AI generation the organizing fact of the record. The court described each filing by its AI origin: a 41-page single-spaced petition “generated using artificial intelligence (AI),” two supplements of “AI-generated argument,” an “AI-generated certiorari petition,” and a 45-page “AI-generated response” to the show-cause order. The substantive defects were of the misrepresentation kind rather than invented cases. Fischer v. Knuck and MacKenzie v. Super Kids Bargain Store exist, but the court held that the petition’s argument “misstates the law, and the cited cases do not support the argument.” The court then stated, citing the Second District’s Rangel decision, that “[t]hese types of AI-hallucinated arguments are just as egregious as a citation to non-existent law,” and added in a footnote that the disqualification-stays-everything argument is one “[t]his Court has seen […] often. Seeing it at all is too often.”

The sanction rests on volume and persistence rather than on any single citation. The court counted eight pro se proceedings initiated in less than a year, more than 90 AI-generated motions below (the litigant’s response acknowledged filing at least 145 motions in the trial court), and a renewed emergency request filed after a warning in a separate case for an emergency filing that cited a non-existent rule of procedure. Against that record, the petitioner’s argument that he was a disabled veteran with a right under the ADA and the Constitution to use AI for legal assistance, and that counsel would cost between $83,000 and $231,000 compared with his $20 monthly AI subscription, did not persuade the court.

For firms, the opinion matters mainly on the opposing side of a self-represented litigant. Here the Fourth DCA acted through its own show-cause order, with no appearance by the respondent, and considered the trial-court docket because the litigant’s own appendices put his trial-court filings before it. The court also reiterated that “[p]ro se litigants and attorneys are responsible for their AI-generated filings.”