Incident Tracker / United States (state)
Sheerer v. Panas
·Court of Appeal of the State of California, First Appellate District, Division Four·US-STATEFiling struckprovisional
On 2026-03-19, California Court of Appeal, First District reversed the child-support order but declined monetary sanctions after the self-represented respondent admitted AI-caused fake citations and quotations. A self-represented party submitted an appellate brief with two false quotations and fabricated or nonexistent authorities, including In re Marriage of Thomson and Keitel v. Heubel, supra.
- Court
- Court of Appeal of the State of California, First Appellate District, Division Four
- Date
- 2026-03-19
- Who used the AI
- Litigant in person
- AI tool
- Not identified in the record
- Conduct
- Panas's respondent's brief attributed quotes to published cases in which no such quote appears, cited cases that do not exist, and cited real authorities for topics they did not discuss.
- Outcome
- Filing struck
- Penalty
- No monetary penalty recorded
- Regulatory outcome
- No separate regulatory disposition recorded
- Status
- Provisional — written by the court-decisions pipeline, awaiting the editor
- Last checked
- 2026-09-08
Primary sources for this incident
Related regulation records for this incident
No related regulation record has been linked to this incident yet.
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Cite this record
SafeLegalAI Global Legal AI Incident Tracker, “Sheerer v. Panas”, safelegalai.com/tracker/anna-sheerer-v-thomas-panas (accessed 2026-10-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.