Incident Tracker / United States (federal)
LeDoux v. Outliers, Inc., No. 3:24-cv-05808-TMC (W.D. Wash.)
·US District Court for the Western District of Washington, Tacoma·US-FEDSanctions
In a Western District of Washington product-liability suit, Judge Tiffany Cartwright fined plaintiff's counsel USD 3,000 for dozens of ChatGPT- and Claude-generated false citations, calling the conduct tantamount to bad faith. On 18 August 2026 the court excluded three expert reports that relied on the same AI-fabricated academic citations and granted summary judgment dismissing the case.
- Court
- US District Court for the Western District of Washington, Tacoma
- Date
- 2026-07-24
- Who used the AI
- Lawyer
- AI tool
- ChatGPT and Claude (per counsel's sworn declaration)
- Conduct
- Plaintiff's counsel Jocelyn Stewart submitted dozens of inaccurate legal and factual citations across at least five filings, including a nonexistent case (Berg v. Chevrolet Motor Div.) and a fabricated version of RCW 7.72.010(2). She also gave two experts an AI-generated citation table containing nonexistent academic articles, and a third expert's report contained its own hallucinations.
- Outcome
- Sanctions
- Penalty
- US$3,000
- Regulatory outcome
- No separate regulatory disposition recorded
- Status
- Verified against listed sources
- Last checked
- 2026-09-03
Primary sources for this incident
- LeDoux v. Outliers, Inc., ECF 265 (W.D. Wash. 24 Jul 2026), Order on Sanctions (Charlotin database archive PDF)
- LeDoux v. Outliers, Inc., ECF 269 (W.D. Wash. 18 Aug 2026), order excluding expert reports and granting summary judgment (CourtListener RECAP)
- CourtListener docket
- NW Sidebar (WSBA), 31 Aug 2026 (secondary)
Related regulation records for this incident
No related regulation record has been linked to this incident yet.
Cite this record
SafeLegalAI Global Legal AI Incident Tracker, “LeDoux v. Outliers, Inc., No. 3:24-cv-05808-TMC (W.D. Wash.)”, safelegalai.com/tracker/ledoux-v-outliers (accessed 2026-09-04). Data: CC BY 4.0.