Two lawyers walked into a courtroom with AI-generated legal research. Neither walked out with their right to practice intact.
US District Judge Sharion Aycock issued a ruling on June 9 disqualifying attorneys Kathleen Wilson and Kathryn Williams from practicing in the Northern District of Mississippi for two years. The reason: both submitted court filings containing fabricated legal citations produced by artificial intelligence tools, in the case of Withers v. Aberdeen.
This wasn’t a situation where one side got caught cutting corners. Both sides of the lawsuit relied on unverified AI output, and both got punished for it.
When your legal brief cites cases that don’t exist
Wilson and Williams each submitted filings that contained citations to legal precedents that did not exist. The cases they referenced, the rulings they quoted, the legal reasoning they built their arguments on: fabricated, courtesy of whatever AI tool they used to draft their research.
