Iovino v. Michael Stapleton Associates, Ltd.
U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Harrisonburg Division · W.D. Va. · Virginia bar guidance
Verified May 15, 2026
- Citation
- Iovino v. Michael Stapleton Assocs., Ltd., No. 5:21-cv-00064, ECF No. 177 (W.D. Va. July 24, 2024)
- Decided
- July 24, 2024
Summary
Federal whistleblower retaliation case under 41 U.S.C. Sec. 4712. Plaintiff objected to the magistrate judge's protective order requiring compliance with the State Department's Touhy regulations for depositions. The objections brief cited two cases that do not appear to exist (United Therapeutics Corp. v. Watson Labs, Inc., 2017 WL 2483620 (E.D. Va. June 7, 2017), and United States v. Mosby, 2021 WL 2827893 (D. Md. July 7, 2021)) and attributed fabricated quotations to real decisions including Graves v. Lioi, 930 F.3d 307 (4th Cir. 2019) and Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020). Plaintiff also misidentified the reporter citation for a Colorado district-court opinion (Menocal). MSA flagged each discrepancy in its opposition brief, characterizing the filing as 'ChatGPT run amok.' Plaintiff filed no reply.
- AI tool:
- Anthropic Claude 3 Opus (per counsel's sworn declaration); MSA characterized the errors in its opposition brief as 'ChatGPT run amok'
What sanction did the court impose?
Judge Thomas T. Cullen overruled plaintiff's objections, affirmed the protective order, and ordered plaintiff's attorneys to show cause why they should not be sanctioned under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(c) and/or referred to their respective state bars for professional misconduct. The court observed that when counsel relies on AI or other technology to draft a filing, 'the attorney is still responsible for ensuring the filing is accurate and does not contain fabricated caselaw or quotations,' citing Mata v. Avianca. The court called counsel's silence in the face of the fabrication allegations 'deafening.'
Why does Iovino v. Michael Stapleton Associates, Ltd. matter for law firms using AI?
Iovino v. Michael Stapleton Associates is Western District of Virginia’s marquee AI-hallucination ruling. Judge Cullen used the memorandum opinion to state the standard clearly: reliance on AI does not diminish an attorney’s personal duty to verify every citation and quotation before filing. The court’s unusual step of issuing a Rule 11(c) show-cause order on its own motion (no Rule 11 motion had been filed by MSA) signals that W.D. Va. treats unverified AI output as a sanctionable abuse of the judicial system. The case is a reference point across Virginia bar AI-ethics materials for the “ChatGPT run amok” phrasing, which originated in MSA’s brief and which the court quoted when describing the scope of the fabrications. In his sworn response to the show-cause order, plaintiff’s lead counsel Thad M. Guyer disclosed that the fabricated citations and quotations were generated by Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus (not ChatGPT, despite MSA’s framing), and that he uses a suite of paid AI subscriptions (Westlaw Precision A+, Lexis+ AI, Anthropic Claude 3 Opus, Perplexity Pro, ChatGPT Team) in his practice.
Sources
Primary sources
Further reading
- Final disposition of the Rule 11(c) show-cause order remains unconfirmed. The CourtListener docket page (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/60400771/) is truncated and does not surface entries beyond late 2022 without a logged-in account; Justia returns 403 on this docket; and the WD Va. PACER ECF system is gated behind PACER credentials and a per-page fee. The August 26, 2024 Guyer declaration (ECF 191-1) is the latest tracked entry. If a subsequent sanctions order, attorneys-fees order, or bar referral exists, it is on PACER and not yet retrieved here.