Morgan & Morgan Lawyers Fined for ‘Hallucinated’ AI Citations

Three Morgan & Morgan PA attorneys were sanctioned by a federal court in Wyoming for filing a motion that contained eight AI-generated cites for cases that didn’t exist.

Lawyers still have an ethical duty to check the cites used in their legal filings and “read the case to ensure the excerpt is existing law to support their propositions and arguments,” Judge Kelly H. Rankin said Monday for the US District Court for the District of Wyoming.

While representing a client in a suit against Walmart Inc., Rudwin Ayala drafted the motion in limine and submitted it to the court. The signatures of T. Michael Morgan and Taly Goody were also on the motion, but neither person was involved in creating the motion and there was no indication that they saw it before it was filed, Rankin said.

After the court noted the cites weren’t valid, Morgan & Morgan acknowledged that they were “hallucinated” by its AI program, apologized, withdrew the motion, implemented new training protocols for using AI, and paid opposing counsel’s fees for defending the motion, Rankin said.

The three attorneys nevertheless violated Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 by presenting to the court a motion certifying that its arguments are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for changing the law, Rankin said.

A fake cite is neither, he said. By signing a document, an attorney certifies that they conducted a reasonable inquiry into existing law, and blind reliance on another attorney can be an improper delegation of that duty, he said.

Ayala had his pro hac vice status in the case revoked and he was fined $3,000. Morgan and Goody were each fined $1,000, but Morgan & Morgan wasn’t sanctioned, because it already took steps to insure that its lawyers in the future independently verify any AI-generated information before relying on it.

Technology hasn’t changed the fact that a lawyer that signs a document certifies that he made a reasonable inquiry into the existing law, Rankin said.

Crowley Fleck PLLP and McCoy Leavitt Laskey LLC represent Walmart.

The case is Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc., D. Wyo., No. 2:23-cv-118-KHR, sanction order issued 2/24/25.

—with assistance from Seamus Hughes