AIFoPa-2026-0009 Date of Record: 11 Apr 2026 3 min read

Oral Argument Lasts Thirty-Seven Seconds

A Nebraska brief carried fifty-seven defective citations out of sixty-three. The Chief Justice stopped oral argument before the attorney had finished his opening.

The Nebraska Counsel for Discipline is the body that investigates complaints against lawyers in that state. In April 2026 it began proceedings against the Omaha attorney Greg Lake.

The Nebraska Supreme Court had determined that a brief he filed in a divorce appeal contained fifty-seven defective citations out of sixty-three. Three cases were entirely fabricated. Twenty further references were classified as AI-generated hallucinations. Thirty-four more contained 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. He had identified irregularities in the brief’s cited authorities.

The court questioned Lake directly about whether generative AI had been used in preparing the brief. Lake said it had not. “It was a draft,” he said. 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.

In one example, the brief cited a 2019 case, Kennedy v. Kennedy, on parental custody. There was no such case. The quotations attributed to it were fabricated.

A committee of lawyers recommended a temporary suspension on 9 April 2026. Lake had a week to respond. On 16 April the Nebraska Supreme Court suspended him.

The archive’s first matter of this kind, AIFoPa-2024-0003, was Mata v. Avianca. It involved six invented cases and a $5,000 fine. The present matter involves fifty-seven defects and a suspension.

G-7 / Personal Annotation / Not For Official Record

There is, in the Bureau’s archive of courtroom transcripts, a small and growing subsection that Grantham-7 has privately begun calling the Silence Before the Question.

It is the pause between the moment a judge realizes that a brief contains fictional authorities and the moment the judge decides to say so out loud. It runs typically between two and four seconds. In the Lake matter it was closer to six. The silence falls at the thirty-first second. By the thirty-seventh the Chief Justice has spoken, and 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. He keeps it 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, he concedes, novel. It is the first filing attributed to AI in the Bureau’s records to be explained by reference to 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 / Personal notation / Silence: 6 seconds / Average: 3.2 seconds / Stopwatch: purchased (personal funds) / Exculpatory Coincidence (Domestic): 1 entry / Filed under: “The Dog Ate My Brief (Anniversary Edition)”

Oral Argument Lasts Thirty-Seven Seconds

Read next

The Pincite Belonged to Avis Rent A Car