Most fabricated citation stories end with a lawyer apologising and a judge deciding what the apology is worth. This one is different in a small way that turns out to matter: the lawyer showed up with a price list.

Mason Cole of Cole Sadkin represented Kimberly Scott in an appeal from the Illinois Human Rights Commission, which had dismissed her race discrimination charge against Starbucks. The Illinois Appellate Court, First District, affirmed the dismissal on July 28, 2026 in Scott v. Illinois Human Rights Commission, 2026 IL App (1st) 251462. Then it turned to the briefs.

There were ten false things in them. Four fabricated statutory quotations. One case that does not exist at all. Five real cases cited for propositions they do not support.

The Part Everybody Skips

The court did not sanction him on the spot. It ordered him to respond in writing first, which is the procedurally careful thing to do and which also produced the document that makes this case worth reading.

Cole conceded the errors and offered the court a schedule. One thousand dollars for the case that does not exist. Five hundred dollars for each of the misstatements. The logic underneath that offer is intuitive and almost everyone shares it: inventing a case out of nothing is the serious offence, and citing a real case for something it does not quite say is a lesser one, a research foul rather than a fabrication.

The court did not buy the distinction. It charged 1,500 dollars per item, flat, across all ten. Fifteen thousand dollars total, with the fabricated case and the mischaracterised case priced identically.

Why The Flat Rate Is The Story

Pricing them the same says something specific about what the court thinks the offence is, and it is not lying. It is not checking.

From the bench’s side of the courtroom, the two failures are indistinguishable in their effect. A judge reading a brief has to verify a fabricated case and a mischaracterised case exactly the same way: pull it, read it, compare it against the proposition. The work is identical. The wasted time is identical. The risk that an unverified assertion slips into an opinion is identical. Whether the underlying text existed before the lawyer typed it changes the moral flavour and changes nothing about the burden.

That is a more useful rule than it first appears, because the tiered version has an obvious exploit. If fabrications cost triple, then the rational move for a lawyer caught out is to argue every item down into the cheap category. Half the citations were real, your honour, they merely do not say what I said they said. A flat rate closes that door before anybody walks through it.

He Says He Checked

Cole told the court he used a premier corporate subscription of ChatGPT and attributed the mistakes to his inexperience in appellate practice. He also said he cross referenced the citations against LexisNexis.

Take that at face value for a second, because it is the most instructive sentence in the whole affair. A paid research database was open. The citations were run through it. Ten false items survived anyway.

There is a way that happens and it is not mysterious. Checking a citation against LexisNexis tells you the case exists and that the reporter numbers are real. It does not tell you the case says what your brief claims it says, and five of the ten failures here were exactly that: real cases, real citations, wrong proposition. A lookup verifies the address. Only reading verifies the argument. A workflow built on the first step catches the invented case and waves through everything else, which is precisely the failure pattern in this record.

The Sentence That Got Him Referred

The court also found that Cole continued to misstate the law after opposing counsel flagged the errors and after he had been warned that sanctions were under consideration.

That is the fact that moves this from an expensive mistake to a disciplinary matter. On the response filing itself the court wrote: “This is unacceptable. Attorney Cole’s response should have included scrupulously accurate citations. Instead, it is yet another sloppy filing.”

Read that in sequence. The brief was wrong. He was told it was wrong. He was told a sanction was coming. He then filed a document whose entire purpose was to explain the wrong citations, and the court found fresh problems in that too. The referral to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission follows from the pattern rather than from the original error.

What This Adds To The Pile

The 2026 sanction docket has settled into a shape. The Sixth Circuit put two attorneys on the hook for full appellate fees, double costs and 15,000 dollars each over two dozen fake citations. A Connecticut filing carried hidden white text instructing an AI what to conclude. The California Supreme Court told a Court of Appeal it could not summarily refuse to hold a sanctions hearing over a prosecutor’s fabricated authority. One tracker of generative AI hallucination orders passed 1,148 documented cases in June, and courts sanctioned lawyers 145,000 dollars in the first quarter alone.

Scott is a smaller case than most of those and it contributes something none of them do: a rate card. Fifteen hundred dollars per false citation, with no discount for the ones that started life as real cases, and no exemption for the lawyer who says he checked.

The Practical Version

Existence checking is not verification. Five of the ten items here passed a database lookup and failed a reading. If the workflow stops at confirming the citation resolves, it is catching the least common failure and missing the most common one.

The response filing is scored too. Cole’s sanctions response was itself found sloppy, and that is what produced the disciplinary referral. The document you write about the mistake is subject to the same standard as the document that contained it, and arguably a higher one.

Do not expect a tiered price. The instinct that a mischaracterised case is a lesser offence than an invented one is widely shared and this court explicitly declined to price it that way. From the reader’s chair, both cost the same to catch.

Scott v. Illinois Human Rights Commission, 2026 IL App (1st) 251462, Illinois Appellate Court, First District, opinion filed July 28, 2026. Commission dismissal of the discrimination charge affirmed. Attorney Mason Cole of Cole Sadkin sanctioned 15,000 dollars, calculated at 1,500 dollars for each of ten false citations and quotations, and referred to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.