The court suspected AI - and referred the attorney for possible discipline
A federal appeals court sided with an employer in a retaliation case - then sanctioned the employee's lawyer over non-existent, likely AI-generated case citations.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed summary judgment for the Florida Department of Corrections on July 10, 2026, closing out a former employee's retaliation claims against the state agency that once employed him.
The worker, represented by counsel, had sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. He said that filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and later asking for a disability accommodation, had led to his demotion and termination.
The court was not persuaded. Reviewing the record, the panel found he could not show that his EEOC complaint "caused his demotion and termination or that he was disciplined for any reason apart from his disciplinary infractions and excessive absenteeism." The same standards ended his ADA claim.
For HR readers, the case turned on causation. The employee could not tie his demotion and termination to his EEOC complaint or accommodation request rather than to his documented discipline and absenteeism.
Then the case took an unusual turn. The corrections department had asked the court to sanction the employee's lawyer and to strike parts of his reply brief, arguing that it cited "two non-existent court opinions and at least five non-existent quotations" from the court's own rulings.
The lawyer withdrew the erroneous statements and called the sanctions request "moot," saying the mistakes were not made in bad faith. Ordered to explain where the non-existent citations had come from, he offered only that "the challenged material did not come from a verified review of the cited opinions." He did not say how it reached the brief.
The panel was blunt. "We are disappointed with counsel's lack of forthcoming candor," the judges wrote, pointing to what they called "a well-publicized problem of attorneys citing hallucinated authorities." Whether the citations "were generated by AI, as we suspect, or simply made up by counsel," they added, the court still expected accurate work.
The judges granted the motion to strike, granted the department's request for attorney's fees tied to the sanctions work, and referred the lawyer to the court's Committee on Lawyer Qualifications and Conduct.
The ruling arrived as courts move to tighten their rules. In a footnote, the panel flagged a new Florida requirement that anyone signing a court filing confirm every cited legal authority exists and is accurately cited.
It is not an isolated issue. An outside tracker cited in the opinion lists more than 1,000 court decisions dealing with AI "hallucinations."
