The federal court in Tacoma recently issued a pointed reminder to lawyers: Ignorance of how technology works is no excuse. The rejoinder came in the context of sanctions against a lawyer under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 in Ledoux v. Outliers, Inc., 2026 WL 2137370 (W.D. Wash. July 24, 2026) (unpublished). The court found that the lawyer had “submitted multiple filings containing dozens of inaccurate factual and legal citations which appeared ‘hallucinated’ by a generative artificial intelligence tool.” (Id. at *1.) The court also noted that two associated expert reports submitted by the lawyer contained similar errors.
The lawyer apologized for the inaccuracies and claimed that they were due to her unfamiliarity with two well-known consumer AI tools the lawyer had used in preparing the filings. The court was not impressed. It noted pointedly that the lawyer “did little to correct her errors” before the court issued a show cause order—even though opposing counsel had raised the issue with the lawyer earlier. (Id. at *4.) Further, a “corrected” filing continued to include “some of the original false citations that Defendants had highlighted.” (Id.) The lawyer conceded she did not independently verify the citations involved. (Id. at *2.)
The court found that the lawyer’s professed “blind trust in these programs was unfounded.” (Id. at *3.) The court quoted WSBA Advisory Opinion 202505 on AI tools in law practice for the fundamental notion that “‘[A] lawyer using technology in law practice is obliged to do so competently.’” (Id.) The WSBA opinion, in turn, cited Comment 8 to RPC 1.1 on competence for the unremarkable proposition that a lawyer using technology to deliver legal services must understand both “the benefits and risks” of the technology concerned. The court imposed a $3,000 sanction and required the lawyer to include a specific certification on all future filings in the case that she had independently verified all citations.
The seminal case sanctioning a lawyer (and the lawyer’s law firm) for “hallucinated” citations in court filings is Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), which also involved a lawyer who claimed he didn’t understand how a consumer AI tool worked and trusted it was correct. When Mata came out three years ago, it might have been written off as an outlier if similar cases had not followed. Three years later, however, the risk of AI tools “hallucinating” has spawned an unfortunate and well-publicized genre of sanctions cases.
In short, as the court in Ledoux pointed out, ignorance of the technology a lawyer uses in law practice isn’t an excuse.
Mark Fucile. Mark handles professional responsibility and law firm risk management throughout the Northwest. He has chaired the WSBA Committee on Professional Ethics, is editor-in-chief of the WSBA Legal Ethics Deskbook and teaches legal ethics as an adjunct for the University of Oregon School of Law at its Portland campus. He can be reached at 503-860-2163 andmark@frllp.com.
