You Might Want to Check That Your Lawyer Isn’t Submitting AI Slop Briefs
Among the myriad ways that commercial artificial intelligence has undermined the smooth functioning of our society is the fact that it has effectively obliterated our ability to simply trust that a professional we hire to do a job for us is actually doing their job, rather than outsourcing all that hard work to some AI chatbot to do for them. How is a person to know if a harried medical intern is getting diagnoses from ChatGPT because they have no time to consider their case? Will you only find out your CPA is having AI do your taxes when audit time comes around? Or, heaven forbid, is the lawyer you hired to represent you in a $12.6 million inheritance lawsuit just submitting AI slop briefs and legal citations … or signing off on your use of AI to do the same? Judging from a rapidly growing database of legal cases derailed by AI hallucinations, and a California lawyer recently fined $100,000 for AI-related offenses, it seems like it’s been increasingly impossible to keep chatbot nonsense out of the courtroom in particular.
The case of that exemplary fine is a particularly interesting one, standing out for what may well be the largest monetary sanction yet brought against a lawyer for signing off on material that turned out to be full of blatant AI slop. And of all things, it revolves around a bitterly contentious family squabble for an inheritance and a vineyard/winery.
As chronicled in a recent story in The New York Times, the siblings of the Wisnovsky family have some seriously sour grapes when it comes to the issue of ownership of the family wine business. Two of the family’s four children, Mark and Michael Wisnovsky, currently operate Oregon’s Valley View Winery, which was established in 1972 by family patriarch Frank Wisnovsky and wife Ann Wisnovsky. After Frank’s death in 1980, Ann Wisnovsky ran the business side of the winery, while brothers Mark and Michael became the viticulturists (grape growers) and winemakers. In 2006, Ann Wisnovsky transferred a minority stake to her two sons; 10 years after that she signed documents that would transfer them the full business and the vineyard land after her death. The only problem: That would cut out two other siblings, elder brother Robert Wisnovsky and sister Joanne Couvrette, who were uninvolved with the winery at this point.
Complicating things is the fact that before Ann Wisnovsky passed away in 2023, she reportedly moved to live with Joanne Couvrette–and around the same time, they filed a new estate plan to give the winery to Joanne and Robert instead of Mark and Michael, the sons who continued to operate it. This all culminated in a bitter family feud and dueling litigation, with Joanne Couvrette and Robert Wisnovsky seeking $12.6 million in damages and property, and Mark and Michael countersuing, saying that their siblings were trying to deprive them of the inheritance they’d worked at for decades. We won’t bother trying to deduce or opine on who has the better legal claim here.
What we do know is that on her side of the suit, Joanne Couvrette ended up with some legal representation that can only be described as questionable. Her California-based lawyer, Steve Brigandi, was reportedly hired because “Ms. Couvrette’s daughter was dating Mr. Brigandi’s son,” and he agreed to represent her for free in the case as a result. But as soon as Brigandi supposedly began working the case, AI-generated or hallucinated legal citations began to be filed–“two appeared in a January 2025 filing, then seven in April and 16 more in May — even after the opposing lawyers had pointed out the previous ones,” according to NYT. Then things took a particularly strange turn when Brigandi was rushed to the hospital just before a deadline for filings, with his doctor later telling the court that Brigandi was experiencing severe kidney disease that had “significantly impaired his cognitive function in the preceding months.”
May this story and appropriate laughter follow these lawyers their entire career.
I propose replacing the AI “mu daddy farm” tv commercial with this touching vineyard story.
— Amethyst Sky ???????? (@amethystsky7.bsky.social) Apr 20, 2026 at 7:14 AM
Perhaps that’s why the judge in the case said that he had been presented with “persuasive” evidence that it was actually not Brigandi who wrote the briefs containing AI hallucinations, but his client, Ms. Couvrette. This was deduced in part by the fact that the briefs were full of seemingly irrelevant and nonsensical citations to other cases on free speech issues, and Couvrette just so happened to be waging another lawsuit on the time, alleging that she had been fired from her job on free speech grounds after calling pro-Palestinian protestors “terrorist sympathizers.” Lawyers for Mark and Mike Wisnovsky essentially argued that their sister was not only using AI to write briefs that were grabbing random, unrelated material from her other lawsuit, but also that her lawyer Steve Brigandi was signing off on that nonsense and submitting it to the court, possibly due to his illness, without verifying any of it. As one of the lawyers for Mark and Mike Wisnovsky put it: “Her AI software seemed to be learning about her and pulling from research she had done in another case.”
Suffice to say, regardless of the exact truth here, a lawyer somewhere in this process was fucking up spectacularly. Because really: If you were an attorney, would you allow your client to perform haphazard AI chatbot “research” and craft briefs to submit? And if for some reason you were allowing a client to do that, would you really submit that shit to a judge and put your own name on it without personally vetting every line of it yourself to make sure it’s not a bunch of purely hallucinated AI slop? It’s no wonder that the judge in the case responded by permanently dismissing Joanne Couvrette’s case against her brothers and the winery, while fining Brigandi almost $100,000.
As previously observed, this seems to be the largest fine yet handed down by a judge whose time has been wasted by legal filings filled with AI lies, but it’s certainly not the only case. In fact, when NYT first touched on the issue back in November, there were roughly 500 cases documented cases where judges had called out AI slop submissions in court, as compiled into this impressive database of AI hallucination cases that was created by a French lawyer. Just a few months later, that same database now has 1,332 cases. In some, a mere warning was issued by a judge. In others, cases were thrown out, or fines were assessed. It doesn’t take much scrolling to find cases like this one from just three weeks ago, where the lawyer in question was referred to the Alabama State Bar for reprimand and fined more than $35,000. What else can we conclude, other than that AI chatbots have proven too enticing a tool for shady lawyers to resist?
#ai Hallucination Cases Database – Damien Charlotin
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/?q=&sort_by=-date&states=Australia&period_idx=0&page=1
A handy tracker for #legal decisions involving #hallucinations #LawFedi
— James Oh (@leafless.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy) Apr 16, 2026 at 3:44 AM
Hell, it makes you wonder: How many cases have already been decided in court, in which fake AI evidence or citations were submitted, and nobody noticed? Surely if more than 1,300 lawyers have already been caught doing this, some that are doing it must have been successful. Just how much AI bullshit has already penetrated the legal record? Are we eventually going to end up with legal precedents that are based on cases that were influenced by chatbot hallucinations that were never properly identified or challenged? Are there people in prison who are there because of bogus AI information, much like the Tennessee woman who was allegedly held in jail for five months based on erroneous AI facial recognition software? What exactly is the benefit of this technology to any of us, when it’s mostly used to oppress us or turn our brains to mush?
Which is all to say: If you’re about to file a million dollar lawsuit, you might want to have a long conversation with your lawyers about AI first.