# A Wyoming federal court fined three attorneys and revoked one's pro hac vice admission after a motion they filed cited nine cases, eight of which did not exist

Page: https://flyvolo.ai/en/changes/ev-20250224-lawyer-3
Date: 2025-02-24 · Stage: Constraint
Can this record move a task judgement? yes
Occupation: https://flyvolo.ai/en/careers/lawyer

## Scope

One US federal civil case. The motions were filed 22 January 2025 and withdrawn the day after the show-cause order; the attorneys admitted the cases were hallucinated by an AI platform. The drafter was fined USD 3,000 and lost his pro hac vice admission; the supervising and local attorneys were fined USD 1,000 each. In setting the amount the court weighed that attorneys have been on notice of this failure mode for some time. The sanction falls on the signing and verification duty, not on using AI as such.

## Source

- US District Court, D. Wyo. — Wadsworth v. Walmart, 2:23-cv-118-KHR, ECF No. 181 (order of Judge Kelly H. Rankin) — https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wyd.64014/gov.uscourts.wyd.64014.181.0_1.pdf (primary source)

## What this means

The generated brief looked finished — nine citations, correct form, one of them real. What the court priced is the step that cannot be delegated: signing certifies a reasonable inquiry, and the fine fell on two attorneys who had not drafted a word. Drafting speed moved; the verification it now requires did not go anywhere, and it attaches to whoever signs.

## What it does not show yet

A sanction is not a measurement of how much drafting has moved. Courts see the filings that failed, never the ones where the check worked, so this says nothing about how widely the tools are used or how often they are right. It also does not protect junior drafting hours: the reply to this risk is a verification step, which is cheaper than the drafting it follows.

## How to verify it yourself

Pick a brief your team filed in the last month and pull three citations at random. Open each in the reporter and check that the case exists, that the proposition is in it, and that the quote is on the page cited. The number that matters is how long that took per citation — that is the cost the speed-up did not remove.


More: https://flyvolo.ai/llms.txt