- First federal appellate-level referral for AI-fabricated citations, issued January 30 2024.
- Per curiam opinion. Treated Mata as having stated the obvious, not as breaking new ground.
- Referral to the Second Circuit Grievance Panel for further disciplinary process.
- The verification duty in the AI context is a settled application of FRCP 11, not a doctrinal innovation.
Park v. Kim.
An attorney's duty under FRCP 11 includes verification of cited authority, and filing a brief containing fabricated case citations is sanctionable conduct regardless of the technology that produced the fabrication. Referral to the Second Circuit's Grievance Panel is the standard appellate-level disposition.
What happened. #
Counsel filed a reply brief in a Second Circuit appeal that contained citations to non-existent cases. When the court could not locate the cited authority, the circuit clerk demanded that counsel produce copies. Counsel acknowledged that the citations had been generated by ChatGPT and had not been verified. The court directly addressed the appellate-level posture: an attorney filing a brief in a circuit court remains responsible for every cited authority, regardless of who or what produced the draft.
The holding. #
An attorney's duty under FRCP 11 includes verification of cited authority, and filing a brief containing fabricated case citations is sanctionable conduct regardless of the technology that produced the fabrication. Referral to the Second Circuit's Grievance Panel is the standard appellate-level disposition.
The court's reasoning. #
The opinion is short and direct. The Second Circuit treated Mata v. Avianca as already having articulated the controlling principle: filing a brief representing as authority cases the attorney has not read and that do not exist is a violation of Rule 11. The court referred the attorney to its Grievance Panel for the discipline-side process. That referral closed the doctrinal question within the Circuit for federal practice. It also created persuasive authority for every other circuit confronting the same fact pattern.
Operational implications. #
For firms with appellate practices, Park v. Kim establishes that the verification standard does not soften at higher levels of the federal system. If anything, the procedural attention to citation discipline is heightened, because appellate briefs are read by clerks who routinely check authority and by panels that treat the brief as a finished representation. The operational implication is that appellate practice groups should have stricter citation-verification workflows than trial groups, not the same. Adding a primary-database verification step to the appellate-brief checklist (with an attestation signed by a senior associate or partner) is the standard countermeasure.
Primary sources. #
- Park v. Kim opinion, CourtListener
- Park v. Kim, Second Circuit Library
- FRCP 11, Legal Information Institute
This is a case brief, not legal advice. Dan Hughes is not an attorney; IXSOR does not provide legal services.