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AI in Court: Sanctions Highlight Professional Failure, Not Tech Failure

ended 13. December 2025

This is not a story about a rogue AI; it is a story about a catastrophic failure of professional judgement, where a nearly $60,000 sanction is just the tip of the iceberg.

Goldberg Segalla's expensive mistake is a textbook example of AI driven laziness, where the hype of a new tool completely overshadows fundamental professional duties. As the judge correctly stated, the issue is not the AI, but the 'inexcusable submission of false authority'. 

From my experience building enterprise systems, this happens when organisations bolt on new technology without redesigning their processes for verification and accountability. 

This Chicago case is part of a dangerous and growing trend of lawyers being sanctioned for citing AI-generated fiction, seen in other high-profile cases like Mata v. Avianca. When the backdrop is a £25 million verdict for children poisoned by lead paint, taking lazy shortcuts is not just embarrassing, it is a dereliction of duty with serious human consequences.

We'd like your views:

  •  Are we treating generative AI as a magic black box, forgetting the centuries-old professional duty to verify every single fact presented to a court?
  • What does it say about a firm's internal processes when a lawyer can submit AI-generated fiction without any meaningful oversight?
  •  Is the push for efficiency and cost-cutting via AI creating a dangerous new standard of legal malpractice?
  •  Beyond fines, what is the real cost to public trust when the legal profession is caught passing off fabricated cases as fact?

6 responses from the Newspage community

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Rohit Parmar-Mistry
Founder at Pattrn Data
This is the inevitable result of trying to automate expertise on the cheap. Businesses and firms are rushing to adopt AI to cut costs and save time, but as these sanctions show, the cleanup costs far more than the savings.

I see this constantly in corporate implementations: a rush to deploy 'black box' solutions to replace human effort, followed by chaos when the results don't stack up. The irony is that proper AI implementation, where humans and machines collaborate, actually requires more skill, not less.

If your business model relies on AI doing the thinking for you, you’re not an innovator; you’re a liability waiting to happen. Real efficiency comes from empowering your experts with better data, not replacing them with a chatbot that can’t tell fact from fiction."
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Kate Underwood
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
This isn’t a story about scary AI. It’s a story about people switching their brains off and hoping nobody notices.
Yes, some firms are treating generative AI like a magic black box. But the centuries-old duty hasn’t moved an inch: you verify what you submit. If it goes in front of a judge, you own it. No excuses.
If made-up “authorities” can make it into a filing, that’s not a tech problem. It’s an internal process failure. No proper checks. No clear sign-off. No second pair of eyes. No accountability. And usually, a culture that quietly rewards speed over doing it properly.
The push for efficiency is absolutely part of this. AI can save time, but it also makes it easier to cut corners at scale. That’s a dangerous new normal, especially in law, where the stakes are people’s lives, livelihoods and liberty.
The real cost isn’t the sanction. It’s trust. Once the public thinks you’ll blag the basics, why would they believe anything else you put your name to?
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Kundan Bhaduri
Entrepreneur, Investor and Landlord at The Kushman Group
The moment a law firm decides that efficiency trumped verification, that speed mattered more than truth, and that a machine output required less scrutiny than human judgment, we are dangerous territory. Ditto for journalists by the way.

How long before scribes come up with fictional stories using generative LLM as a magical black box? What can you imagine this could cause to the world around us if one could manipulate the truth with fictional stories and publish convincing stories in the press that nobody cares to verify but everyone repeats and shares as gospel?

Funny enough, AI implementation actually demands more human intervention and expertise, not less, because machines require rigorous oversight precisely because they cannot distinguish fact from plausible fiction. Yet firms have inverted this entirely, treating AI as a cost-cutting replacement for human judgment rather than a tool requiring enhanced human scrutiny.
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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
AI worked exactly as designed. It generated pattern-matched legal citations on demand. The failure? Humans treating a hi-tech "game of Snap" l like a qualified researcher, then skipping every verification step that enterprise systems should never skip.

Organisations are bolting on shiny new AI "brains" without redesigning their accountability loops. Where was the second pair of eyes? The escalation flag? The "does this pass the smell test" checkpoint that any decent system would demand?

Unattended AI's black box thinking and outcomes kill trust. Transparent, human-in-the-loop systems build it.

Law firms are learning the hard (and expensive) way what proper AI implementation actually requires: respect for technology's limits and continued reliance on human sanity checks.
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Patricia McGirr
Founder at Repossession Rescue Network
AI’s outputs punish the end user while corporates applaud mediocre performance. This case exposes how AI misuse can poison the legal sector, where firms treat AI like an untrained junior and trust it as if it were senior counsel. This is not a rogue model. It is a lawyer choosing speed over duty and submitting fiction to a court. Governance risks being dismissed as time consuming and costly when it is the very metric by which professional quality, outcomes and public impact are judged. When false authority reaches a courtroom, the public carry the consequences. If the law wants credibility, it must keep human oversight firmly accountable for every decision AI touches.
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Chris Hayes
Employment law Partner and Head of Innovation at HM3 Legal
Remember when people resisted the internet in law? They said it was risky, untested, and would never replace traditional methods.

Today, it is the backbone of legal practice.

AI is the same—progressive, inevitable, and transformative.

The duty to verify facts remains absolute, but blaming AI for fabricated cases misses the point.

I would questions whether it was "laziness" , or, maybe a misjudgment stemming from unrelenting pressure and crushing deadlines?

Either way, firms must build safeguards and a safe culture, so neither excuse stands.

Efficiency cannot come at the cost of integrity. The real risk is not fines—it is public trust.

We absolutely must adopt and deploy AI, however, we must do so responsibly, with oversight and transparency, or risk being left behind.