U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock has sanctioned every lawyer of record in Withers v. City of Aberdeen after filings from both sides contained fabricated legal citations.
The case involved a contractual dispute between lawyer Tom Withers and the city of Aberdeen, Mississippi, over apparently unpaid legal fees.
“This case presents the Court with an unusual scenario — attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct,” Judge Aycock wrote in her sanctions order dated June 8, 2026.
Each party was represented by two lawyers, one out-of-state and one local, and the failures ran across all four of them in different but equally troubling ways.
The two out-of-state lawyers admitted they had used generative AI, one for research and the other to draft briefs, and that neither bothered to verify what the AI had produced.
The two local counsel said they were “unaware of their respective co-counsel’s use of AI,” but admitted committing essentially the same error by failing to review what their co-counsel had submitted.
The court found that three separate filings contained citations to cases it could not locate, including one nonexistent Mississippi case and three nonexistent federal cases in city filings, plus two nonexistent Mississippi cases in Withers’ opposition brief.
Lawyer Kathleen Wilson admitted using an AI tool called “First Drafts” to draft entire briefings and continued using AI even after Judge Aycock had already identified hallucinated cases in her filings.
The court found Wilson’s claim that she was unaware AI could produce hallucinated cases “to be insufficient and incredulous,” revoking her pro hac vice admission and barring her from the district for two years, alongside a $2,500 fine.
Kathryn Williams, who deployed an AI research tool designed for in-house work rather than Mississippi law, was also barred from appearing in the district for two years for “blindly relying” on the tool and must pay a $3,500 fine.
The two local attorneys, McClinton and Ridgeway, were disqualified from the case and ordered to pay $1,000 fines each for failing to review legal citations before submission.
Judge Aycock also ordered copies of the sanctions ruling sent to relevant state bar associations as an additional punitive and cautionary measure.
The case was first highlighted by Rob Freund, a lawyer who frequently posts about AI hallucination cases, who called it a “comedy of AI errors” and noted there were “two clients who basically were paying for ChatGPT (or whatever LLM) to argue against itself.”
According to the AI Hallucination Database, there have now been 1,598 cases worldwide in which someone faced consequences for relying on a generative AI tool that fabricated information.