The lawyers on both sides of a federal court case in Mississippi were caught using artificial intelligence, a situation where, effectively, generative AI tools were used to argue against each other. The judge wrote in a blistering sanctions order, that the lawyers wasted the court\u2019s time, and that \u201cin an era of rampant unverified AI usage within the legal field, this case presents a prime example of the risk associated with serving as a rubber-stamp.\u201d\u201cThis case presents the Court with an unusual scenario\u2014attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct,\u201d Sharion Aycock, senior United States District Judge for the Northern District of Mississippi wrote in a sanctions order. \u201cThis court is yet again \u2018burdened with addressing AI hallucinations court filings.\u2019\u201dThe case in question involved a contractual dispute between lawyer Tom Withers and the city of Aberdeen, Mississippi, over apparently unpaid legal fees (Withers was not representing himself and was not sanctioned by the court). The case was first noticed by Rob Freund, a lawyer who frequently posts about cases involving AI hallucinations. Freund called it a \u201ccomedy of AI errors,\u201d and suggested \u201cthere were two clients who basically were paying for ChatGPT (or whatever LLM) to argue against itself.\u201d404 Media has repeatedly covered the phenomenon of lawyers using AI to prepare their filings, and the specifics in this court case follow a similar pattern to what we\u2019ve seen before: Lawyers for both sides cited nonexistent, hallucinated cases while making their arguments. The difference is that every lawyer involved in the case is implicated, leading Aycock to pause the proceedings, cancel the trial, and disqualify all four lawyers involved. Two of the lawyers were barred from appearing before the court for two years; all lawyers received a fine of between $1,000 and $3,500, depending on Aycock\u2019s assessment of their culpability for not verifying the outputs of the AI they used.\u00a0Judges around the country have been increasingly frustrated with lawyers who use AI; last week, we wrote about a judge who ripped into various lawyers for citing hallucinated cases in New York.All four lawyers involved either admitted to directly using AI or admitted to rubber stamping legal briefs that had been prepared with AI without reviewing them. Aycock wrote that at a hearing in January, \u201ceach of the attorneys expressed embarrassment and apologized to the court.\u201d One of the lawyers said they used an AI tool to do legal research; another, Kathleen Wilson, admitted to using an AI tool called First Drafts to write the entire briefing. The two other attorneys said they did not review the briefs in question and submitted them to the court.\u00a0Notably, Aycock said that Wilson had since been caught continuing to use AI after the court had detected she was using it. \u201cWilson explained that she was shocked when the Court issued the show cause order pointing out the hallucinated cases appearing in her filing. In essence, Wilson took the position that she was unaware that AI could produce hallucinated cases and explained that she did not even know what a hallucinated case was,\u201d Aycock said. \u201cThe Court finds that explanation to be insufficient and incredulous.\u201d\u201cThe Court is compelled to note that it has serious concerns that Wilson has continued this practice of AI misuse in other cases after she was put on notice of her violations in this case,\u201d she added, noting that other judges in other cases had found hallucinated cases in Wilson\u2019s filings as recently as April, four months after she was initially asked to explain her AI use in this case. \u201cHer continued AI misuse demonstrates an extreme dereliction of professional responsibility on her part. Though this Court cannot consider subsequent conduct that did not occur before it in determination of the appropriate sanction(s) in this case, it finds that at minimum Wilson\u2019s apologies to this Court on January 20, 2026 were not sincere.\u201dAnother lawyer, Kathryn Williams, admitted to using an AI tool that she did not name to do research. Notably, that tool was described as being built for \u201cin-house legal research,\u201d and that the tool in question is not supposed to hallucinate cases.\u00a0\u201cWilliams explained that the software was built to produce results from jurisdictions in which her law firm typically practiced, which did not include Mississippi,\u201d Aycock wrote. \u201cShe explained that this case is the only Mississippi case she has ever been involved in, yet she resorted to using the software apparently knowing that it was not designed to encompass Mississippi law.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"