Skip to content

Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations

Erica Whitesock v. Bird Global, Inc., and The City of Austin

District Court of Travis County, Texas, 250th Judicial District · State trial courts · TX · · No. D-1-GN-25-011111 · order

Fabricated or misquoted citationsGAI

On 2026-06-08, in Erica Whitesock v. Bird Global, Inc., and The City of Austin, the Travis County district court granted the City of Austin's jurisdictional plea, dismissed those claims with prejudice, and awarded $10,000 in attorney fees. Counsel filed a response using quotations that did not appear in the cited source, nonexistent or hallucinated authorities, authorities used for propositions.

Disposition
The court granted the City of Austin's jurisdictional plea, dismissed those claims with prejudice, and awarded $10,000 in attorney fees.
Recorded conduct
Counsel filed a response using quotations that did not appear in the cited source, nonexistent or hallucinated authorities, authorities used for propositions they did not support, and a nonexistent rule or legal standard. — outcome: sanctions; actor: lawyer; $10,000
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.

✳ ✳ ✳ As counsel for the City of Austin has noted, Plaintiffs’ response to the City’s plea to the jurisdiction contains a non-existent quotation of a legal authority. The response falsely quotes the Texas Tort Claims Act as containing an exception to governmental immunity for “engaging in a proprietary function, including . . . allowing use of a public facility for compensation.” Counsel for Plaintiffs Bradford Klager admitted to the Court that this fake quote was completely fabricated by a generative artificial intelligence chatbot, and it was blindly copied and pasted into the Plaintiffs’ response without checking its veracity. Plaintiffs’ response also states that “CPRC § 75.002(d) waives the immunity of governmental entities for gross negligence causing personal injury on public land used for 06/08/2026 10:19:51 AM D-1-GN-25-011111 Velva L. Price District Clerk Travis County recreational purposes.” As the City’s attorney correctly notes, this provision does not address governmental immunity.

compiled by the Cognesio LLP editorial teammethodas of 2026-09-07v0.1.1coding CC BY 4.0JSON Hugging Face GitHub