Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations

Modern Floor Specialists, Inc. v. City of Los Angeles

United States District Court for the Central District of California · Federal district courts · CA · 2026-04-03 · No. 2:25-cv-04765-ODW (JPRx) · order

Fabricated or misquoted citations

On 2026-04-03, U.S. District Court for the Central District of California granted the city defendants’ motion to dismiss and ordered counsel to file a declaration or show cause regarding the potentially hallucinated Mabee citation. Counsel submitted a filing with fabricated or nonexistent authorities, including Mabee v. County of Orange and Cochran v. City of Wichita.

Disposition: The court granted City Defendants’ motion to dismiss, denied plaintiffs’ sanctions motion, deferred City Defendants’ sanctions motion for hearing, and ordered counsel Matic to show cause about the Mabee citation.
Recorded conduct: Plaintiffs’ counsel Joshua Matic cited supposed Ninth Circuit case Mabee v. County of Orange; the reporter citation led to unrelated Tenth Circuit case Cochran v. City of Wichita and the court found no such Mabee case. — outcome: pending; actor: lawyer
Canonical record: Incident tracker entry — verified outcome, regulator disposition and related rules

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

In Plaintiffs’ opposition brief to City Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss, Matic cites to a supposed Ninth Circuit opinion in Mabee v. County of Orange, 784 F. App’x 585, 588 (9th Cir. 2019). ... the Court finds no case in any federal or state jurisdiction with the case caption Mabee v. County of Orange. ... If Matic cannot demonstrate that Mabee exists, Matic shall SHOW CAUSE why the Court should not sanction him for using artificial intelligence to perform legal research and failing to perform a reasonable inquiry into whether his legal citations are supported.

Court document: damiencharlotin.com
Read: 2026-09-07 · court document read from a public copy; the court's own copy was not found online when checked (see notes)provisional
Found via: charlotin-hallucinations-db
Notes: Re-coded from the document 2026-09-08 (independent second read). Official copy not obtained 2026-09-08: not in the court's GovInfo feed for this docket (many district courts publish only some orders) (checked govinfo.gov (USCOURTS), CourtListener RECAP search).

United States court documents are public domain; the topic coding, disposition line and summary are SafeLegalAI's reading of the document for comparison, not a finding about any person named in it. This record summarises a public court document or official publication and reports what it says; SafeLegalAI makes no findings of its own. Individuals and organisations are named only as they appear in that public record. Anyone named may send a right of reply, correction or contextual update (for example an appeal, vacatur or later disposition) via /report; we add a dated note where appropriate. Reply or correct this record.

compiled by the SafeLegalAI editorial teammethodas of 2026-09-08v0.2.2coding CC BY 4.0JSON Hugging Face GitHub