- First Oregon Supreme Court order addressing AI-fabricated authority, issued early June 2026.
- Sanction was procedural: the petition was dismissed entirely, not refiled with correction.
- Petitioners had already added four further non-existent cases on resubmission, removing the good-faith excuse.
- Establishes Oregon as the latest state-supreme-court jurisdiction to address the verification duty post-Mata.
Witkins v. McGreevy.
A mandamus petition supported by fabricated case citations generated by an AI tool is properly dismissed in its entirety. The Oregon Supreme Court declined to grant leave to amend after the petitioners had been put on notice of the fabricated authorities and had submitted further citations to non-existent cases.
What happened. #
Petitioners filed a mandamus petition with the Oregon Supreme Court that included citations to cases that did not appear in the Oregon Appellate Reports or the Oregon Reports, along with quoted passages that were not in any real opinion. The court asked the petitioners to resubmit corrected materials. The resubmission added at least four additional citations to cases that also did not exist. The petitioners had used a legal-AI assistant identified in the court record as "LegalAI."
The holding. #
A mandamus petition supported by fabricated case citations generated by an AI tool is properly dismissed in its entirety. The Oregon Supreme Court declined to grant leave to amend after the petitioners had been put on notice of the fabricated authorities and had submitted further citations to non-existent cases.
The court's reasoning. #
The court dismissed the petition entirely. The order treated the dismissal as the appropriate sanction for procedural defectiveness: a court cannot adjudicate on the basis of authority that does not exist. The court did not reach a discipline analysis (state bar referral) in the published order. The dismissal has the practical effect of foreclosing the underlying relief, regardless of whether the underlying merit existed.
Operational implications. #
For Oregon practitioners, Witkins sets a state-supreme-court precedent for the verification duty that parallels the federal rule articulated in Mata and Park v. Kim. The operational implication for firms with Oregon practice is that the citation-verification workflow must run on state filings as well as federal. Pulling from a legal-AI assistant without independent verification puts the underlying matter at risk of summary dismissal, not merely sanctions. For multi-state practices, the case is evidence that the verification standard is hardening at the state-supreme-court level and should be assumed to apply in any jurisdiction.
Primary sources. #
This is a case brief, not legal advice. Dan Hughes is not an attorney; IXSOR does not provide legal services.