Prisbrey v. Prisbrey
Utah Court of Appeals · Utah Ct. App. · Utah bar guidance
Verified May 14, 2026
- Citation
- Prisbrey v. Prisbrey, 2026 UT App 39, 2026 WL 787382 (Utah Ct. App. Mar. 19, 2026) (No. 20250070-CA)
- Decided
- March 19, 2026
Summary
Appellee Leona Prisbrey's counsel David W. Read filed an appellate brief in a divorce case whose citations the panel found largely fabricated. In a published opinion by Judge David N. Mortensen (joined by Judges Gregory K. Orme and Amy J. Oliver), the court documented in footnote 6 that of six citations in the standards-of-review section, four were wrong (incorrect case names, propositions unrelated to the cited material, or paragraphs that "do not exist"), and of seven citations in the four-page argument section, only one was correct, with several appearing "to be made out of whole cloth." The brief also contained zero record citations. The opinion does not name a generative AI tool, but the pattern (nonexistent paragraphs, mismatched case names, fabricated propositions) is the signature profile of LLM-hallucinated authority.
- AI tool:
- Unspecified generative AI
What sanction did the court impose?
No monetary sanction or formal discipline issued in the opinion itself. The court reversed the district court's marital-property determination on the merits (late Rule 26 disclosures), vacated the judgment, and remanded for a new trial. Footnote 6 publicly documented the citation failures and expressed that the panel was "perplexed as to what happened in the composition process."
Why does Prisbrey v. Prisbrey matter for law firms using AI?
Prisbrey is the genteel version of the AI-citation problem: a published appellate opinion that catalogs a brief’s fabricated authorities in a footnote, declines to name a tool or impose sanctions, and lets the reputational damage do the work. For a managing partner, the lesson is that the bench does not need to invoke Rule 11 or order a show cause hearing to make a citation failure career-defining. The opinion is now the top Westlaw result for the attorney’s name, and the panel’s parting observation that “any similarity between the citation in the brief and the material cited appears to be purely accidental” will outlast any monetary penalty a court could have imposed.
Sources
Primary sources
Further reading
Source PDF is a Westlaw printout mirrored from the Damien Charlotin hallucination database. We are working to add the underlying court docket (PACER, CourtListener, or court website) as a second source.