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Attorney Fee Award Cut from $100K to $50K, Partly as Sanction for Hallucinated Citations
A Kansas judge cut a lawyer’s fee award from $100,000 to $50,000, citing fabricated and misused case citations and other conduct the court described as unprofessional and sanctionable. The lawyer had won the reinstatement of a nursing student who was punished for refusing a vaccine on religious grounds, but the judge said the fee reduction was warranted by problems in the lawyer’s filings.
The court said the lawyer would otherwise have received $100,000, rather than the $300,000 he sought, under Kansas’s religious freedom law. It identified two real cases cited for propositions they did not support and at least six citations to non-existent Kansas cases; the lawyer called the errors technical and clerical but did not explain their origin. The judge suspected generative AI may have been used, but said counsel had not admitted this, and also cited a disputed journal entry filed as if opposing counsel had approved it.
In short
- Lawyer’s fee award was reduced from $100,000 to $50,000.
- Judge cited at least six non-existent case citations.
- The lawyer had secured a nursing student’s reinstatement.
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
A substantial fee reduction can be defended as a proportionate response to filings containing invented authorities and real cases used to support claims they did not establish. Courts depend on lawyers to verify their citations and accurately represent whether an opposing party approved a filing; sanctions can protect that trust and discourage similar conduct, while leaving the student’s reinstatement intact.
The case against
The lawyer had secured meaningful relief for a student asserting religious freedom, and reducing an otherwise justified fee award may penalise that work as well as the filing errors. If the mistakes were clerical and not deliberate, a narrower sanction could address them without so sharply reducing compensation; suspected AI use, which the lawyer did not admit, should not itself determine the penalty.