AI and Legal Practice: A $15,000 Warning from the Illinois Appellate Court

Recently, Chip Merlin and the Property Insurance Coverage Blog have been discussing artificial intelligence (“AI”) use in the legal field. In his blog post titled Four Decades A Lawyer And Forty-Six AI Hallucinations, Chip discussed a decision last month from the Florida Second District Court of Appeal where the court affirmed a judgment because it found the appellant’s arguments lacked merit. However, in its decision, the court also wrote sixteen pages discussing sanctions given to the appellant’s lawyer after finding forty-six instances of hallucinated legal authority in an amended initial brief and reply brief.

After reading his blog post, it reminded me of a recent decision from one of the jurisdictions I practice in. In July, the Illinois Appellate Court faced a comparable situation in Scott v. Illinois Human Rights Commission, 2026 IL App (1^st) 251462 (Ill. App. July 28, 2026). Like the decision Chip discusses in his blog post, this decision is another warning that lawyers cannot outsource legal research to AI without constraints. In Scott, the court sanctioned an Illinois attorney $15,000 after his filings contained four fabricated statutory quotations, a nonexistent case, and five cases that did not support the propositions for which they were cited. Shockingly, one of these misstatements of the law was not even contained in the initial briefing. It was contained in a response that the attorney was directed to file explaining the false quotations and citations in his initial brief.

The court even discussed imposing additional non-monetary sanctions such as ordering him to serve a copy of the opinion upon every judge who presides over a pending matter in which the attorney has an appearance. It is no longer just monetary sanctions that the courts are considering. The court also considered ordering the attorney to attend continuing legal education (CLE) on appropriate AI use. The Illinois Appellate Court made it clear – the lawyer remains responsible for everything filed with the court.

These instances expose the fundamental problem with AI in legal practice: it can sound authoritative while being completely wrong. AI may be a useful tool for certain tasks, but lawyers should never confuse AI for a real human. If a lawyer relies on AI to identify authority, every citation and quotation must be independently verified against actual sources on actual legal research tools like Westlaw or Lexis Nexis. The consequences of failing to do so are no longer theoretical and courts are considering imposing non-monetary sanctions. These sanctions can harm your reputation, prejudice your client, and damage the integrity of the judicial process. As the court in Scott stated, “our overloaded court system must be able to trust that attorneys’ submissions are accurate rather than fabricated.” Scott, 2026 IL App (1^st) 251462, at ¶ 60.