Most of the AI citation stories that reach a court end the same way. A solo practitioner or a small shop is caught, apologises, pays something, and the opinion is written as a warning to the profession. The subtext is always that this happens to people who do not have the resources to check.
This one happened to Deutsche Bank.
What Happened
The decision is a published order of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, Douglas v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Company, No. 24-CV-1099, filed September 3, 2026, before Associate Judges Easterly and Shanker and Senior Judge Glickman, per curiam.
Underneath it is an ordinary case. Barry Douglas is appealing a Superior Court order that granted Deutsche Bank judgment on the pleadings in a judicial foreclosure under D.C. Code section 42-816. Mr. Douglas is self represented. Deutsche Bank is represented by the law firm McCabe, Weisberg & Conway, LLC.
Both sides briefed it and the appeal was submitted for decision without argument on March 11, 2026. Then, in the court’s own words, while reviewing the bank’s brief it discovered that it contained multiple citations to cases that the court was unable to locate or confirm as legitimate.
On June 22 the court issued an order to show cause asking why it should not strike the brief for citing nonexistent cases that are possibly the product of artificial intelligence (AI) hallucinations.
The Associate’s Answer
One day later, attorney Loishirl W. Hall filed a response on her own behalf. She confirmed that four of the brief’s cited authorities did not exist, that they were not legal authority and that they should not have appeared in a brief filed with this Court.
Her explanation is worth quoting exactly, because it is not the explanation people expect. She said she had used Google’s generative artificial intelligence search tool to assist in locating case authority and had not verified the existence or accuracy of those citations before filing.
Not a chatbot she went looking for. A search box.
Ms. Hall accepted that she had a duty to verify every authority, apologised, told the court she had since checked the rest of the brief’s citations, and pledged not to rely on an AI tool for legal research without confirming each authority in future. She also informed the court that she no longer works at the firm.
The Firm’s Answer, Which Is The Story
The firm then filed its own response for Deutsche Bank. It said it was unaware of Ms. Hall’s actions when the brief was filed, and that it only became fully aware of the situation once the court issued the show cause order and Ms. Hall responded.
The court did not let that phrasing pass. It noted the implication, that the firm did nothing after the order to become fully aware on its own that it had filed fake case citations, and called it surprising, to say the least.
There is a harder fact underneath the wording. Two other attorneys were listed on that brief alongside Ms. Hall, named in the order as Jianna Jaques Santos and Michael T. Cantrell. The firm provided no information about their review of the brief before filing. In the meantime it moved to withdraw Mr. Cantrell, representing that he had retired from the practice of law.
The firm referred to an internal policy but did not attach it for the court to look at. It did not describe what it had done to supervise or review the work. It emphasised that these actions were taken by a former employee. It acknowledged only that further review should have been undertaken, and said it was genuinely remorseful.
What The Self Represented Litigant Said
Mr. Douglas asked the court, among other things, to deny Deutsche Bank the chance to file a corrected brief. He registered what the order calls incredulity that a competent law firm representing one of the largest financial institutions in the world could make such a mistake.
The court’s response to that is one sentence: we echo Mr. Douglas’s incredulity.
The brief was stricken.
Ignorance Stopped Being A Defence
The order spends its first substantive section on why nobody gets to be surprised any more. It quotes the Fifth Circuit in Fletcher v. Experian Information Solutions, Inc., 168 F.4th 231, 235 (5th Cir. 2026): if it were ever an excuse to plead ignorance of the risks of using generative AI to draft a brief without verifying its output, it is certainly no longer so.
It points at the American Bar Association’s Formal Opinion 512 on generative AI tools, issued July 29, 2024, as a marker for how long the profession has had notice.
And it makes a point that cuts against the comfortable version of this story, citing the Fourth Circuit in In re Nwaubani: the traditional legal research services, Westlaw and LexisNexis, have themselves adopted generative AI features. Using AI for legal research is no longer a choice somebody makes by going somewhere unusual. It is increasingly the default behaviour of the tools lawyers already pay for.
That figure appears in the order’s own quoted material, alongside a description of the failure modes: misunderstanding holdings, failing to distinguish between legal actors, such as presenting a rejected party argument as the holding of the court, and failing to respect the hierarchy of authorities. The order characterises those as the sort of errors you might expect from a first semester law student.
The Part Every Firm Should Read Twice
The order does not say every lawyer who signs a brief has to personally check every citation in it. It says the opposite, in terms: such a requirement would be impractical, unduly burdensome, and unnecessarily duplicative given the availability of reasonable alternative procedures.
Guarding against fabricated citations can be a group effort. Split a brief between associates, make each responsible for the citations in the section they drafted, and the signing partner is entitled to rely on that structure.
Entitled to rely on it, though, means the structure has to exist. That is exactly what the firm here could not show. It did not produce its policy, it did not describe its supervision, and it could not say what the two other attorneys on the brief had done. The defence available to a firm with a real review process was not available to this one, because nothing on the record showed there was one.
Why This One Matters More Than The Fines
The financial sanctions cases are easy to file away. Somebody was careless, somebody paid.
This order is about something structurally worse. The AI tool was a general purpose search box, not a legal product, and it was used by one associate. The four fabrications then passed through a brief with three attorneys on it, at a firm doing volume foreclosure work for a major bank, and arrived at an appellate court unnoticed. It was caught by judges reading it, months after filing, in a case where the opposing party had no lawyer to catch it for them.
Every control that was supposed to sit between a bad citation and a court is visible in that sentence, and every one of them was empty.
Source: District of Columbia Court of Appeals, Douglas v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Company, No. 24-CV-1099, published order filed September 3, 2026, Superior Court case 2023-CAB-005422, read in full on September 7, 2026. All quoted language is from that order. The order notes it is subject to formal revision before publication in the Atlantic and Maryland Reporters. This is reporting, not legal advice.