Button v. McCawley
U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida · S.D. Fla. · Florida bar guidance
Verified May 14, 2026
- Citation
- Button v. McCawley, No. 0:24-cv-60911-DSL (S.D. Fla. Feb. 4, 2026) (Leibowitz, J.) (Order Adopting R&R, ECF No. 87)
- Filing date
- February 4, 2026
Summary
Dusty and Mitchell Taylor Button, proceeding pro se, opposed a motion for attorneys' fees in their suit against Sigrid McCawley in the Southern District of Florida. District Judge David Leibowitz, reviewing the Buttons' objections to the magistrate judge's report, counted citations to non-existent authorities, misquoted cases, and misrepresented court orders "over fifty times." The fabrications continued after Magistrate Judge Augustin-Birch had already admonished the Buttons to verify their citations: a falsely attributed Parekh v. CBS Corp. quotation reappeared in their objections with the quotation marks simply removed. The court named several wholly non-existent cases, including Lopez v. Bank of America, Harris v. City of Auburn, Avery v. Ward, and In re: Marriage of Smith. A footnote catalogs three other federal courts that had already reprimanded the Buttons for the same conduct.
- AI tool:
- Unidentified (the court found 'frequent use of artificial intelligence' to generate hallucinations; the Buttons denied AI use and named no tool)
What is the current procedural posture?
Judge Leibowitz adopted the magistrate judge's report, overruled the Buttons' objections, and awarded the defendant $11,740 in attorneys' fees. He overruled the objections on two independent grounds: clear-error review, and the court's inherent authority to sanction the Buttons' bad-faith conduct. The court also ordered the Buttons to show cause, by February 25, 2026, why they should not be separately sanctioned under Rule 11 for the hallucinated citations, with a signed verification certification required and sanctions to follow automatically if they failed to respond. The Rule 11 sanction itself was left pending that response.
Why does Button v. McCawley matter for law firms using AI?
Button v. McCawley is the clearest example so far of AI hallucinations as a documented litigation pattern rather than a one-time slip. The Buttons did not fabricate a citation once. Judge Leibowitz counted more than fifty fabricated, misquoted, or misrepresented authorities, and the conduct continued after a magistrate judge had expressly told the Buttons to verify their citations. When confronted, they removed the quotation marks from a fabricated Parekh quotation and kept citing it for the same proposition.
Two features make the order useful. First, the court treated the persistence as evidence of bad faith, which is the finding that unlocks inherent-authority sanctions, and it used that finding to overrule the Buttons’ objections independent of the merits. Second, a footnote catalogs three other federal courts, in the Central District of California, the Southern District of New York, and the Western District of Washington, that had already reprimanded the Buttons for the same conduct. For a firm opposing a serial pro se litigant, that footnote is the template: a court will take judicial notice of a litigant’s AI-hallucination history in other districts, and that history converts a “first offense” framing into a bad-faith one.