Wednesday, November 19, 2025
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Court Appeal:
Lawyer Sanctioned for ‘Spurious Citations’ in Petition, Brief
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Div. Two of the Fourth District Court of Appeal has sanctioned an attorney for using fabricated citations—generated, at least in part, with the help of artificial intelligence tools—both in an unsuccessful petition for a writ of supersedeas to stay implementation of the judgment and then in the opening brief, rejecting his assertion that the errors were simply clerical in nature.
Justice Frank J. Menetrez authored the order, filed Monday, imposing the sanction on San Bernadino County attorney Jeffrey Dean Grotke, saying:
“[W]e issue a sanction in the amount of $1,750 to be paid by Grotke individually to the Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division Two within 30 days.”
Acting Presiding Justice Richard T. Fields and Justice Michael J. Raphael joined in the order.
On Oct. 16, the court issued an order to show cause why Grotke should not be sanctioned for “relying on fabricated legal authority,” notifying the attorney that he had filed a petition and opening brief that each included citations to cases that either do not exist or do not stand for the legal propositions for which he said that they stood.
Wrong Citations
Menetrez explained:
“Cases with the case names provided by Grotke do exist, but the volume and page number citations for the actually existing cases are different from the volume and page number citations provided by Grotke….And the actually existing cases with those names do not support the legal propositions for which Grotke cited nonexistent cases with those names.”
Saying that “[w]e are authorized to sanction an attorney for committing any ‘unreasonable violation’ of the rules,” Menetrez said Grotke’s conduct ran afoul of California Rule of Court, rule 8.204(a)(1)(B), which provides that briefs must “[s]upport each point by argument and, if possible, by citation of authority.”
At the Nov. 4 hearing on the order to show cause, Grotke acknowledged that he used artificial intelligence (“AI”) in preparing the opening brief, saying that he “took the brief that [he] had and [he] had it regenerated using AI,” supposing that the tool might help him with organization.
He admitted that he could not recall if he used the tool in generating one of the citations he relied upon in the writ petition but denied running the filing through an AI program. Grotke insisted that the spurious citations were the result of a “clerical error,” commenting that he meant to rely on the cases identified in the opening brief and simply “mis-cited…the reporter/volume/page level.”
Not Credible
Declaring that Grotke’s claims were “not credible,” Menetrez wrote:
“It is difficult to understand how Grotke’s four spurious citations could possibly be mere clerical errors, and Grotke has not intelligibly explained how it would be possible. The spurious citations do not involve the mere omission or addition or transposition of one or several digits. Rather, all four spurious citations are completely different from the correct citations for the actually existing cases that have those case names. Grotke’s spurious citations bear the hallmarks of hallucinated citations produced by generative AI.”
He continued:
“Grotke’s claim that he intended to cite the actually existing cases is similarly lacking in credibility. The actually existing cases do not support the legal propositions for which Grotke provided the spurious citations in the Writ and the [opening brief]. Consequently, it would make no sense for Grotke to claim that he intended to cite the actually existing cases to support those legal propositions. Grotke attempts to avoid that problem by claiming that he cited the four cases for various other legal propositions, which he describes in his declaration. But the attempt fails, because the legal propositions described in his declaration are not the legal propositions in the Writ and the [opening brief] for which the spurious citations were provided as authority.”
Promise to Check
Menetrez acknowledged that the lawyer apologized for the errors and promised to check citations “very carefully” in the future but said that, unlike the attorneys sanctioned in recent, similar cases, “Grotke has not admitted that the Writ and the [opening brief] contain hallucinated citations that were produced by generative AI.”
Commenting on the sanctions, Grotke said:
“Mistakes are inevitable in legal drafting. For example the Court said my reliance on ‘fabricated’ authorities was ‘unmeasonable’….The cases were not fabricated. They were real cases, that were improperly cited.”
The order was issued in Schlichter v. Kennedy, E083744.
Decision on Appeal
Although Monday’s opinion was certified for publication, Menetrez’s Nov. 6 opinion resolving the appeal in the case by Grotke’s client, Gary Kennedy, wasn’t.
Kennedy claimed, in probate proceedings, to have been the “putative spouse” of the decedent, Joanne Schlichter Kennedy, identified by Menetrez in that earlier opinion as the appellant’s “long-term romantic partner.” Gary Kennedy maintained in testimony that the two had, in fact, been wed in a church at least 30 years earlier but, in light of religious convictions, had not taken out a marriage licence.
San Bernardino Superior Court Judge Damian Garcia held that Gary Kennedy was not an intestate heir. Agreeing, Menetrez said, in response to one of the arguments on appeal:
“Kennedy’s testimony confirmed that he was ‘aware that in California you need a marriage license to get married,’ but he chose not to get a marriage license. That testimony constitutes substantial evidence that Kennedy did not believe in good faith that he and Joanne were validly married and instead chose not to enter into a legally valid marriage.”
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