City of Dickinson v. Helgeson

What sanction did the court impose?

The court affirmed the vexatious litigant designation and granted the City's request for sanctions, awarding $500 against Helgeson under N.D.R. App. P. 13 and 28(l). The court held the underlying traffic infraction was noncriminal, so the district court had jurisdiction under N.D. Sup. Ct. Admin. R. 58 to designate Helgeson a vexatious litigant. The court rejected Helgeson's constitutional challenges to the vexatious-litigant rule. Notably, the court "warn[ed] all litigants that using erroneous citation to authority, and providing courts with citation to fictitious cases, exposes the filing party to the imposition of sanctions appropriate under the circumstances."

Why does City of Dickinson v. Helgeson matter for law firms using AI?

Helgeson is the most procedurally significant case in this batch because it is a state supreme court decision rather than a single-judge district-court order. North Dakota now has a statewide judicial holding that “[f]ake or nonexistent legal citations typically are the result of AI ‘hallucinations’” and that filing them subjects the filer to sanctions under N.D.R. App. P. 13 and 28(l). The opinion is unanimous: Lisa Fair McEvers, C.J., and Justices Crothers, Tufte, Jensen, and Bahr.

Two textual moves are worth noting for firm-policy purposes. First, the court explicitly endorses AI use: “By this statement and citation, we do not criticize the use of AI or AI-assisted tools. To the contrary, we encourage and embrace the use of technology to improve the work product of all litigants, whether represented or self-represented.” Second, the court frames verification as the litigant’s responsibility regardless of AI provenance: “[I]t does not matter whether Helgeson’s fictitious cases and erroneous citations were AI-generated or the result of careless work. Rather, regardless of how the errors came to be, he is responsible for the consequences of his errors.” The pairing matters for any firm drafting an internal AI-use policy in North Dakota: the statewide rule is “use is fine, fabrication is not.” The pro se posture and traffic-infraction underlying offense make this a low-stakes case factually, but the rule it lays down applies equally to represented practitioners on appellate briefs.