AIFoPa-2026-0008 — The Hallucinated Brief Hits Six Figures
On 4 April 2026, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark D. Clarke of the District of Oregon imposed approximately one hundred and ten thousand dollars in total sanctions in connection with three legal briefs filed in the civil matter Couvrette v. Valley View Winery. Ninety-six thousand of that sum — consisting of $15,500 in disciplinary penalties and $80,500 in opposing counsel's fees — was assessed directly against plaintiff's pro bono counsel, San Diego attorney Stephen Brigandi; the remainder was apportioned to co-counsel. It is, as best as is currently recorded, the largest monetary sanction ever imposed in the United States for the filing of generative-AI-fabricated legal material.
The three briefs were found, on examination by the court, to contain twenty-three citations to judicial opinions that did not exist, and eight direct quotations purportedly drawn from cases that did exist but which had been altered to say things those cases had never said. Judge Clarke characterized the filing in his opinion as "a notorious outlier in both degree and volume," placing it materially above the prior U.S. record of approximately thirty-one thousand dollars set earlier in the first quarter of 2026.
In a finding of some note for future classification purposes, the court concluded — citing what it called "persuasive evidence" — that the AI-fabricated briefs had not been drafted by the attorney of record but by the plaintiff herself, Ms. Joanne Couvrette, a serial pro se litigant with a documented history of submitting filings generated by large language models. The court's sanctions against Brigandi accordingly rested not on authorship but on the duty of counsel of record to verify material before signing and submitting it, a duty which the court found had not been discharged in this instance.
The underlying matter, a civil dispute concerning an Oregon vineyard, remains before the court. Brigandi, who was serving without fee, retains his license; the Bureau is advised that disciplinary proceedings before the California State Bar have not, at time of filing, been initiated.
G-7 / Personal Annotation / Not For Official Record
I have been told, by the classification officer two desks down, that the Plant now produces a noise when a new hallucinated-citation sanction crosses a previous record — a soft, descending, apologetic chime, like a lift announcing a floor it would rather not have stopped at. I did not believe this until Monday, when the chime occurred during lunch and three of us looked up from our sandwiches at precisely the same moment, and Mrs. Anand, who has been here longer than any of us and who processes all sanctions above fifty thousand dollars personally, said, without looking up from her form, "Oregon."
I should say, for the record, that I did not ask to be the officer of record on the running index of these figures. In the spring of 2023 the relevant column contained a single entry — five thousand dollars and, as I recall, a stern letter from a judge in the Southern District of New York — and I added it to the ledger on a Wednesday afternoon expecting, perhaps naively, that it would be the only entry in the column and that by Friday the column would be retired and reassigned, along with several of the other small columns that accumulate on a classification officer's desk in the course of an ordinary week, into the General Column for Matters Concluded. It was not retired. It was, on the contrary, subdivided.
The column now has its own drawer. The drawer now has its own ledger. The ledger now has its own quarterly review, which I attend, and at which I am asked, each quarter, whether I would like to propose an upper bound for the vertical axis of the associated chart. I have, each quarter, proposed an upper bound. Each quarter the upper bound has been overtaken before the ink has dried. Last Tuesday I proposed two hundred thousand dollars as a sensible ceiling for the remainder of the year and Mrs. Anand laughed — she has a very quiet laugh, of a kind that travels slowly — and said that at the current rate the chart would require a second sheet of paper before the end of the month. She has a small, private wager with the head of Archives on the question of whether it will require a third. She would not tell me what she had bet, only that she was, as she put it, "cautiously not losing."
My twenty-sixth request for reassignment is currently pending. It cites, among other grounds, an observation I had hoped not to have to make in writing, which is that whatever process is presently filling this column will not be out-run by any ceiling I can propose, by any chart I can maintain, or, I increasingly suspect, by the available supply of opposing counsel's fees in the state of Oregon.
— G-7, Senior Incident Classification Officer / Sanctions ledger: subdivided / Mrs. Anand: cautiously not losing / Reassignment request #26: pending