One fake citation can sink an entire filing
Picture the moment a judge’s pen stops moving. A litigant has just filed her closing arguments in a landlord-tenant dispute (the routine kind, argued over unpaid rent and property damage, that gets decided without anyone outside the case ever hearing about it). The filing leans on a supporting statute and a cited appellate ruling, neatly footnoted. Then the court reads it. Checks it. And stops: the statute doesn’t exist. Neither does the ruling. Not “cited imprecisely.” Not “an old case that got renumbered.” They do not exist. Someone, or something, made them up.
That is what happened in Zlatin v. Assayag (Civil File 77773-12-20), decided by the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court in July 2025. The plaintiff, an attorney representing herself in an eleven-year rental dispute, built part of her closing arguments on a fabricated “Fair Rental Law” and an appellate decision that was never handed down. The court didn’t stop at rejecting the bad citations. It rejected the bulk of the roughly NIS 300,000 she was seeking, awarding a single month’s rent instead, and ordered her personally to pay costs: NIS 5,000 to the state treasury and NIS 20,000 to the defendants. Judge Moria Cherka described the filing as a draft “full of notes… and fictitious references” that wasted the court’s and the defendants’ time. Israeli courts have made the underlying principle explicit in other AI-hallucination rulings from the same period: a party who relies on AI output without checking it owns the consequences of what gets filed under their name.
It’s a small case on its face, a landlord-tenant dispute over rent arrears, not a headline ruling on some grand question. That’s exactly why it should worry you: it doesn’t take a marquee case for an AI hallucination to sink a legal filing. It happens in an ordinary civil suit, filed the same week as dozens of others that never make the news. This one just happened to get caught.
Israel is not the first, and won’t be the last
This has already happened elsewhere, and it went badly. In 2023, two lawyers in New York filed a brief in Mata v. Avianca built on precedent that ChatGPT had simply invented for them: plausible-sounding quotes, case numbers that were never assigned to any real docket. Judge P. Kevin Castel sanctioned them in June 2023, ordering a $5,000 fine and finding they had acted in “subjective bad faith.” (Turns out “the chatbot told me so” ranks somewhere below “the dog ate my homework” as a legal defense.) Since then, courts in England, Canada, and Australia have reported similar incidents: England’s High Court sanctioned a barrister and referred lawyers to their regulator in two 2025 rulings; a Canadian judge warned that unchecked AI citations “can lead to a miscarriage of justice” and imposed costs; Australia’s Federal Circuit and Family Court referred legal representatives to their regulators over suspected AI-generated material. Israel is one entry in a growing, and now well-documented, list of jurisdictions working through the same problem.
The pattern is identical everywhere, which is the unsettling part. The model isn’t lying in any moral sense. It is generating text that looks like a legal citation: correctly formatted, correctly structured, sometimes with section numbers that sound entirely plausible, because that’s what the statistics of “what a citation looks like” produced. It doesn’t know the citation is fake. It’s just filling in a template. (And it never once pauses to add, “you might want to double-check this.”)
The question a court cannot answer alone
This is where the expert’s job starts. “Does this citation exist” sounds like a simple question, but it’s one you test systematically, not eyeball. A software expert works it like this:
- Define the narrow technical question. Not “is this document trustworthy” in general, but: does every citation in this document exist in the official record (Nevo, Takdin, the Judicial Authority’s database)? Yes or no, line by line.
- Collect the materials. The list of citations from the document, the AI tool and version used if known, the prompts behind the drafting if they were preserved, and access to the official case-law and statute databases.
- Run a repeatable method. Cross-check every citation against the official record, line by line, with a documented trail. Not “I read it and it looked familiar.” A process either side can rerun and get the same answer from.
- State the limits. Confirming a citation exists is not the same as confirming it says what the motion claims it says. A real citation can still be misquoted, misapplied, or simply irrelevant. A credible expert states exactly what the check covered, and what it didn’t.
- Survive cross-examination. When the method is documented and reproducible, “that’s just your opinion” stops working as an objection. It’s a test either side can repeat and land on the same result.
That’s the entire distance between “something feels off here” and an opinion that holds up in court.
Why this needs a software expert witness, not the lawyer alone
Lawyers read law for a living. That doesn’t mean they’re equipped to run an automated verification query against a legal database, recognize the hallucination patterns typical of a particular language model, or document a digital chain of custody that survives cross-examination. A lawyer who spots one suspicious citation can check it by hand, and that works right up until the document has dozens of citations, or opposing counsel argues the whole verification process was superficial.
A court-appointed software expert does not just check whether the AI “guessed wrong.” The expert builds a documented, repeatable verification process that stands on its own, one someone can defend when opposing counsel asks: how did you check this, and why should the court believe you.
The side that brings in a computer forensics expert witness early, rather than once the evidence is already filed, is the side that holds.
What to do before you file
If you are preparing a motion, a pleading, or an expert opinion that used any AI tool at any stage, ask this before you file: who checked every citation against an official source, and how is that documented. Do not wait for the court to find the fake ones. By the time it does, the damage goes beyond a drafting error: the whole filing has a credibility problem.
The above is general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Specific facts of the case are drawn from the sources cited.