What happened

In a lawsuit filed in June 2023, attorneys representing Walmart and Jetson Electric Bikes from law firms Morgan & Morgan and Goody Law Group submitted a motion in January 2025 citing eight non-existent legal cases. 

Rudwin Ayala, T. Michael Morgan, and Taly Goody represented plaintiffs suing Walmart, arguing that a fire had destroyed their clients' house and caused serious burns to family members. 

The defendants were unable to identify the cases cited, though one of them appeared to have been a case fabricated by MX2.law, an in-house database launched by Mr. Ayala and Mr. Morgan’s company.

A federal judge discovered the fake citations and sanctioned the lawyers with fines totaling USD 5,000. He also removed the primary attorney from the case.  

Why it happened

The lawyers admitted using AI to generate the legal case citations, with one saying he had used AI for the first time to add case law supporting the exclusion of certain evidence. 

"Our internal artificial intelligence platform 'hallucinated' the cases in question while assisting our attorney in drafting the motion in limine," they wrote, per The Register.

The lawyers admitted they failed to verify the accuracy of the AI-generated citations before filing, and two had not even reviewed the motions before submission.