An attorney representing State Farm was ordered by a California judge to pay a financial sanction for submitting legal filings with fictitious case references. The court determined that the lawyer used an artificial intelligence program to generate citations that hallucinated nonexistent cases in documents submitted to the court.

The $999.99 fine is one cent below the monetary threshold that would force the judge to report the attorney's conduct to the state bar. This penalty stems from the lawyer's reliance on an AI tool that produced fraudulent court citations instead of real legal precedents.