Thursday, June 4, 2026
Page 5
Ninth Circuit:
Two O.C. Attorneys Suspended Relating to AI Fabricated Cites
Order Serves as ‘Warning’ to Members of Bar, Says Brief Signer Unable to Avoid Responsibility by Pointing to Unlicensed Writing Team, Both Breached Duty of Candor by Claiming Mistakes Were Merely ‘Typographical’
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in yesterday on the use of artificial intelligence tools in legal filings, suspending two Orange County immigration attorneys from practice in the court for six months, as well as imposing monetary and other penalties, relating to briefs submitted with fabricated citations and statements characterizing the errors as “typographical” mistakes that involved no use of the hallucination-prone technology.
Saying that “we issue this disciplinary order, and explain our reasoning at some length, as a warning to the members of this Court’s bar,” the court declared:
“[B]e aware of the risks of overreliance on generative AI, read everything cited in a court filing—whether drafted by generative AI or not—and disclose quickly and transparently generative AI hallucinations that are inadvertently included in court filings.”
Circuit Judge Danielle J. Forrest and Senior Circuit Judges Richard A. Paez and Carlos T. Bea signed yesterday’s order imposing the sanctions on Mike Singh Sethi of the City of Orange-based Sethi Law Group and William Rounds, formerly of Sethi Law Group and now, according to State Bar records, with U.S. Legal Group APC.
They declared that each attorney is “personally sanctioned in the amount of $2,500,” “hereby suspended from practice before this Court for a period of six months,” and ordered them to “provide a copy of this Order to their clients, opposing counsel, and the presiding judge in every pending state or federal case in which they are counsel of record.”
The order also mandates that, for a period of two years, “all attorneys at the Firm” must “include in all future filings” a sworn statement “addressing whether generative AI was used, disclosing the name of the tool used, and certifying that the attorney signing the brief or other filing has personally reviewed the filing and that all citations and quotations therein refer to existing authority.”
Immigration Matter
Sethi and Rounds served as counsel for the petitioners in the Lnu v. Blanche matter, in which the petitioners sought review of a Board of Immigration Appeals order. Sethi signed an opening brief that contained citations to non-existent cases and purported quotations from real opinions in which the language did not appear.
He later moved to correct the record, representing in the written request that the reliance on two fake cases was the result of “typographical errors” and seeking to replace the citations with two opinions with similar names, different reporter numbers, and, in one instance, a different year.
The new cases do not support the propositions for which they were cited, and the motion failed to address the misattributed quotations. Only Rounds appeared for oral argument, and he attributed the mistakes to possible “copy and paste error[s] or something like that.”
When pressed on whether generative-AI tools might have been used, he categorically denied that the technology was employed in creating the briefs before conceding that it was possible, clarifying that the filing was written by a recent law-school graduate who was not yet licensed to practice. The panel ordered both attorneys to show cause why they should not be sanctioned, suspended, or disbarred from practice before the court.
In a joint response, the lawyers explained that the firm employs a team of recent law school graduates to write briefs and that the attorneys do not normally “vet citations.” They indicated that they did not suspect AI was used because the office has a policy prohibiting the use of the technology in drafting.
Sethi and Rounds proceeded to concede that the errors were likely the product of an unauthorized use of AI by the brief writers and apologized to the court, saying that they have hired a licensed attorney to check all briefs prepared by the unlicensed authors in the future. Sethi expressed an intention to remedy similar errors made in other pending matters.
Multiple Rules Violated
Saying that both attorneys “violated multiple rules of appellate procedure and professional conduct,” the panel declared:
“Sethi did so when he signed and filed briefs in this Court with nonexistent cases, misattributed quotations, and gross misrepresentations of real cases….Sethi and Rounds also violated their duty of candor when they represented the errors as innocent typographical mistakes and when they affirmatively denied that generative AI might have been the source of the errors.”
Clarifying that “[w]e do not sanction Sethi and Rounds for the simple fact that they or their subordinates used generative AI, the judges noted that the use of such tools is not “inherently unethical or irresponsible.” However, pointing to a 2024 study which showed that certain AI programs utilized by Westlaw and Lexis “hallucinated 17% and 33% of answers,” they wrote:
“The most common error modes of the latest generation tools include misunderstanding holdings, failing to distinguish between legal actors (e.g., presenting a rejected party argument as the holding of the court), and failing to respect the hierarchy of authorities….In other words, the sort of errors that we might expect a first-semester law student to make, but certainly not licensed attorneys appearing before this court.”
Awareness of Tendency
Highlighting that “[l]awyers using generative AI must thus be aware of the tendency of generative AI to make these mistakes and guard against them,” they opined:
“It is ultimately irrelevant to the disciplinary analysis (except for the duty of candor)…whether Sethi, Rounds, or anyone at the Firm actually used generative AI….[T]he rules are not violated at the point of research and drafting, but at the point of signing and filing. If an attorney files a brief with cases or quotations that do not exist, or completely misrepresents what a real authority stands for, it generally does not matter if he pulled the hallucination or misrepresentation from the output of an artificial intelligence tool or from his own natural intelligence.”
Rejecting the assertion that the errors were irrelevant because “other cases…stand for the propositions asserted,” the jurists remarked that “it was [Sethi’s] responsibility to cite them” and opined:
“It is no excuse that Sethi entrusted substantive cite checking to subordinates, and it is no excuse that Sethi purportedly did not know his subordinates had used generative AI….Sethi’s signature was an attestation that he personally reviewed the contents of the brief, including the cited authorities, and that they were accurate.”
They added:
“The misconduct in this case did not end with the initial filing of the…briefs. At every subsequent step…Sethi and Rounds have knowingly or recklessly made false statements to this Court.”
No Plausible Explanation
Commenting that “we have not identified any plausible explanation for how innocent…copy-paste errors could turn” the real cases into the cited fabricated ones, the court attributed knowledge that the errors were something more than typographical to the lawyers. Paez, Bea, and Forrest wrote:
“An attorney who erroneously submits a hallucination in a brief must notify the Court and opposing counsel immediately, describe the nature of the error (a fabrication, a gross misrepresentation, etc.), and disclose how the error came about—here, misused generative AI.”
Saying that the lawyers failed to live up to their obligation to do so, and calling out Sethi for “engag[ing] in more subtle subterfuge” in another matter in which he filed a “Notice of Errata” that did not disclose that certain citations “were hallucinations,” the court declared:
“[F]ailing to disclose the…source of the errors is conduct unbecoming of a member of this Court’s bar.”
Continuing, they said:
“If, in the Motion to Correct, Sethi and Rounds had disclosed that AI was used in the opening brief against firm policy and apologized for failing to check the brief, lesser sanctions may have been warranted. But that is not what they did. The gravity of discipline we impose, including the temporary suspension of practice, is owed to this repeated failure of candor.”
The case is Lnu v. Blanche, 24-4790.
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