A Lawyer Was Just Permanently Suspended Over AI-Invented Case Law — a US First

In February 2026, attorney Greg Lake stepped up to argue a divorce appeal before Nebraska's Supreme Court — and 37 seconds in, the justices stopped him after discovering that some of the case citations in his filing simply didn't exist. The result: the first indefinite license suspension in US history tied specifically to AI-invented material used in court, ComplianceHub reports.

What an AI "hallucination" actually is: a language model confidently states something wrong or entirely made up — like a citation to a court case that doesn't exist — in exactly the same tone it uses for accurate information. The model isn't lying on purpose; it's predicting the most plausible-sounding text, not verifying whether it's true, Norton Rose Fulbright explains.

This is far from an isolated incident: in Q1 2026 alone, US courts issued more than $145,000 in sanctions specifically over AI hallucinations in filings, including a record $110,000 penalty in Oregon. A dedicated tracking database now counts 1,725 such cases worldwide, Damien Charlotin's database notes.

What this means in practice: even commercial legal AI tools built specifically for legal work still hallucinate — and responsibility for fact-checking stays entirely with the human who signs the document, not the software.

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