AIFoPa-2026-0009 — Oral Argument Lasts Thirty-Seven Seconds
On 9 April 2026, the Nebraska Counsel for Discipline recommended the temporary suspension of Omaha attorney Greg Lake following the Nebraska Supreme Court’s determination that a brief he had filed in a divorce appeal contained fifty-seven defective citations out of sixty-three total — including three cases that were entirely fabricated, twenty additional references classified as AI-generated hallucinations, and a further thirty-four citations containing material errors in case names, statutory references, or quotation accuracy.
The deficiencies came to the court’s attention on 19 February 2026, during oral argument. Chief Justice Jeff Funke halted proceedings thirty-seven seconds after Lake began speaking, having identified irregularities in the brief’s cited authorities. The court proceeded to question Lake directly about whether generative AI had been used in the preparation of the brief. Lake stated that it had not, attributing the errors to the accidental filing of a draft version — he told the court that his computer had broken on his tenth wedding anniversary and that he had uploaded the wrong file.
The Nebraska Supreme Court dismissed this explanation. In a written opinion issued 20 March 2026, the court stated that Lake’s account “lacks credibility” and referred the matter to the Counsel for Discipline. The court noted that the brief included fictitious references from multiple Nebraska court cases, Nebraska statutes, and Supreme Court rules, and that one of the cited cases — Kennedy v. Kennedy — was a real Nebraska Court of Appeals memorandum decision from 2019 that had been misrepresented in the brief.
The Counsel for Discipline’s recommendation of temporary suspension was issued on 9 April 2026. Lake retains his license pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings. The Bureau notes that this is the second incident filed in the current session involving AI-fabricated citations in U.S. legal filings; the first in the archive, AIFoPa-2024-0003, involved six fabricated citations and resulted in a requirement to show cause. The present matter involves fifty-seven defects and a recommendation for suspension.
G-7 / Personal Annotation / Not For Official Record
There is, in the Bureau’s archive of courtroom transcripts, a small and growing subsection devoted to what Grantham-7 has privately begun calling the Silence Before the Question. It is the pause — typically between two and four seconds, though in the Lake matter it was closer to six — between the moment a judge realizes that a brief contains fictional authorities and the moment the judge decides to say so out loud. In the Lake transcript, this silence falls at the thirty-first second. By the thirty-seventh second, the Chief Justice has spoken, and what had been a routine appellate hearing in a divorce case has become something else entirely.
Grantham-7 has timed the silence in every transcript in the subsection. The average is 3.2 seconds. He is aware that this is not a useful metric. He is aware that timing the silences of judges confronted with imaginary law is not, strictly speaking, part of his duties as a classification officer. He has nonetheless purchased, with personal funds, a rather nice stopwatch, which he keeps in the top drawer of his desk next to the Plant’s spare saucer and a letter from Mrs. Anand regarding the quarterly review of the sanctions chart. The stopwatch has a lap function. He has used the lap function.
The broken-computer-on-the-anniversary defence is, Grantham-7 concedes, novel. It is the first time in the Bureau’s records that a filing attributed to AI has been explained by reference to both a hardware failure and a romantic milestone simultaneously. He has created a new internal tag for it: Exculpatory Coincidence (Domestic). The tag has one entry. He suspects it will remain at one.
— G-7, Senior Incident Classification Officer / Silence: 6 seconds / Stopwatch: purchased / Exculpatory Coincidence (Domestic): 1 entry / Filed under: “The Dog Ate My Brief (Anniversary Edition)”