Law Firm Apologizes After AI-Drafted Motion Contains Fabricated Quotations
Three lawyers at Binnall Law Group PLLC apologized to a federal judge Friday after one attorney used Anthropic's Claude to draft a legal motion containing "phantom" quotations-citations that don't exist in the cases cited.
Partner Jason Greaves filed the motion on May 6 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The motion sought to quash a subpoena for Joseph Guy, a former deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem, in a lawsuit over Trump administration federal layoffs.
Greaves said he used Claude because of "tight time constraints" and sent the AI-drafted document to an associate for fact-checking. He did not verify the quotations himself.
"While I reviewed the cited cases generally to confirm their applicability, as well as many other cases that I reviewed, I did not double check the quotations and obviously did not read the cited cases carefully," Greaves wrote in a declaration to Judge Susan Illston.
This was Greaves's first time using an AI platform to draft a brief.
Firm Commits to New Safeguards
Founding partner Jesse Binnall and partner Lindsay McKasson, who represents Guy, also filed apologies. Binnall said the firm has established AI use policies and will implement additional training on verifying documents and citations.
"The obligation to submit accurate, verified citations is not merely a technical rule-it is a fundamental duty that every attorney owes to every court," Binnall wrote. "We failed that duty in this instance, and we are committed to ensuring it does not happen again."
The incident adds to a growing list of attorney sanctions related to AI misuse in legal practice. Courts have increasingly scrutinized lawyers who rely on AI tools without proper verification, particularly when those tools generate false case citations or quotations.
Case: AFGE v. Trump, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:25-cv-03698
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