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. 

The fire had destroyed the plaintiffs' 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 ChatGPT. 

A US federal judge issued an order for the attorneys to explain why they should not face sanctions for citing fake cases.

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.