Every fabricated citation story so far has ended in the same place. A lawyer files something, the citations turn out not to exist, a judge writes an angry order, and the lawyer pays. The expert who signed the report, if there was one, walks away with a bruise and a fee.
LeDouxx v. Outliers, Inc. is where that stopped. On August 18, 2026 the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, sitting in Tacoma, excluded an expert’s report outright because the academic citations in it were hallucinated. The mechanism was not a sanction. It was Federal Rule of Evidence 702, the reliability rule, and that is a much more permanent thing to have happen to you.
The Case, And Why It Has Three Orders
LeDouxx v. Outliers, Inc., case number 3:24-cv-05808, reported at 2026 WL 2408808. This is the third time the court has had to deal with citations in this one case.
On January 9, 2026 it excluded a different set of experts. On July 24, 2026 it sanctioned the plaintiff’s lawyer over what the order described as dozens of inaccurate factual and legal citations across at least five different filings. On August 18 it reached the expert report.
Three orders, one case, and the pattern in them is worth naming: the problem did not start with the expert and it did not end with the lawyer. It ran through the whole file.
The Admission That Matters
The lawyer told the court she had used AI tools she did not understand how to use.
That sentence is doing a lot of work and it is the reason this case is different from the ones that came before it. It is not a defence and the court did not treat it as one. What it is, is an accurate description of the failure mode that has now produced more than a thousand sanctioned filings: not a lawyer trying to cheat, a lawyer using a tool whose output looks exactly like research and is not research, and having no method for telling the difference.
The experts, for their part, did not verify the citations either. Nobody in the chain checked, because at every link somebody assumed the previous link had.
Why Rule 702 Is Worse Than A Fine
This is the part that should worry anyone who testifies for a living.
A Rule 11 sanction is a punishment. It is paid, it is unpleasant, and it is over. Rule 702 is a finding about whether the witness is reliable enough to be heard at all. The court did not say the expert behaved badly. It said the hallucinated citations rendered his opinions inherently unreliable, which means the opinions themselves cannot be trusted, not merely that the paperwork was sloppy.
An expert excluded under 702 for fabricated sources carries that order into every future case. Opposing counsel will find it. It will be attached to a motion in limine in the next matter, and the one after that. The fine in Whiting v. City of Athens was fifteen thousand dollars each and that was a bad afternoon. This is a career document.
The Chain Of Custody Nobody Built
There is a practical lesson in here and it is not “do not use AI”. Courts have said repeatedly, including in this line of cases, that using the tool is permitted when the output is checked.
The lesson is that a citation has to have a chain of custody and almost no firm has built one. Somebody generated the reference. Somebody put it in a report. Somebody filed the report. In this case not one of those three people opened the article and confirmed it existed, and the reason is that the reference looked exactly like a real reference: plausible authors, plausible journal, plausible year, plausible page range.
Fabricated citations do not look wrong. That is the entire problem. They look like the ones that are right, which means the only defence is a mechanical one: every source in every filing gets pulled and read by a human before it goes out, no exceptions, no sampling.
Where This Goes Next
The tracker counts have gone from a curiosity to a category. What LeDouxx adds is a second doorway. Until now the exposure was on the lawyer, through Rule 11 and the court’s inherent authority. Now the expert has an exposure of his own, through the evidence rules, and it does not require anyone to prove intent or even to prove AI was used. It only requires the citations not to exist.
An expert cannot outsource verification to counsel. Counsel cannot outsource it to the expert. The order in Tacoma says, in effect, that both of them thought they could.
Sources: LeDouxx v. Outliers, Inc., No. 3:24-cv-05808, 2026 WL 2408808 (W.D. Wash. Aug. 18, 2026) (unpublished), as reported by the Washington State Bar Association NWSidebar on August 31, 2026; the July 24, 2026 sanctions order and the January 9, 2026 exclusion order in the same case; and the Norton Rose Fulbright 2026 update on generative AI sanctions. Read September 4, 2026. Related reading on this site: the Sixth Circuit sanctioned two dozen fake citations without confirming AI and a state supreme court refused to let a fabricated citation complaint die.