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Four Lawyers Reportedly Sanctioned After Purportedly AI-Related Hallucinated Citations Appeared in Withers v. City of Aberdeen

In Withers v. City of Aberdeen, a federal judge in Mississippi reportedly sanctioned four lawyers after filings from both sides contained purportedly hallucinated legal citations linked to unverified AI use. The court said Kathleen Wilson used First Drafts to draft a filing and Kathryn Williams used an AI legal-research tool; all four attorneys were removed from the case and fined.

Date it happened
2025-11-05
Organisation involved
Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway, Mark McClinton, Lawyers, Kathryn Y. Williams, Kathleen M. Wilson
Product, system or model
Large language models, First Drafts, AI research tools
Where this came from
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This incident was imported from AI Incident Database and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.

This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.