A California attorney made an expensive mistake when trying to cut corners on a legal brief.
Amir Mostafavi submitted an appeal in an employment-related case, but 21 of the 23 cases he cited to support his argument were fake—hallucinated by AI—or included phony quotes from existing cases. Judge Lee Smalley Edmon sanctioned Mostafavi and fined him $10,000.
“To state the obvious, it is a fundamental duty of attorneys to read the legal authorities they cite in appellate briefs,” Judge Edmon says in a strongly worded opinion. “Plainly, counsel did not read the cases he cited before filing his appellate briefs: Had he read them, he would have discovered, as we did, that the cases did not contain the language he purported to quote, did not support the propositions for which they were cited, or did not exist.”…