Incident Tracker / United States (state)
Olbera v. Sykes
On 2026-03-30, Indiana Court of Appeals reached the merits despite briefing defects and warned that the self-represented brief included an apparently hallucinated Indiana case. A self-represented party submitted a brief with fabricated or nonexistent authorities, including Pavan v. Smith. The warning applied to later filings in the same case.
- Court
- Court of Appeals of Indiana
- Date
- 2026-03-30
- Who used the AI
- Litigant in person
- AI tool
- Not identified in the record
- Conduct
- Sykes's pro se appellee brief failed to include record citations in the statement of facts, failed to support arguments with relevant authority, and cited one seemingly hallucinated case, S.S. v. D.M., 150 N.E.3d 663 (Ind. Ct. App. 2020).
- Outcome
- Noted, no consequence
- 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
- 2026-09-07
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, “Olbera v. Sykes”, safelegalai.com/tracker/nicole-olbera-et-al-v-tiara-sykes (accessed 2026-10-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.