Oct 21, 2025Single source
Westlaw CoCounsel reportedly produced false legal quotations in a lawyer's appeal brief in United States v. Farris
AI loose in the worldMisinformationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
In United States v. Farris, court-appointed attorney Steven N. Howe said he used Westlaw CoCounsel to draft appellate briefs. They reportedly contained false quotations and misleading descriptions of precedent. The court appointed new counsel and restarted briefing. Howe lost his compensation and faces possible disciplinary action.
What this means for youIf a professional uses AI to draft documents, the output can contain invented quotes that look real. Anyone relying on AI-drafted work, such as a lawyer or a client, should check every quotation and citation against the original source.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1572
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
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