Judge Sharion Aycock of the US District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi has sanctioned all four lawyers involved in a civil case and cancelled the scheduled trial after attorneys on both sides of the proceedings cited AI-hallucinated fake cases in court filings — the first time a federal court has imposed sanctions simultaneously on opposing counsel for the same AI misuse conduct.
The order, filed on 9 June 2026, found that all four lawyers violated Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires attorneys to certify the factual accuracy of court filings. Kathleen M. Wilson and Kathryn Y. Williams were each barred for two years from appearing in the Northern District of Mississippi.
Wilson was fined $2,500 and Williams $3,500. Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway and Mark McClinton, who had sponsored the temporary admission of Wilson and Williams to participate in the Mississippi proceedings, were each fined $1,000 and removed from the case.
Wilson, a solo practitioner, used First Drafts — an AI-powered legal drafting platform — to write a motion that contained two citations to nonexistent cases. She told Judge Aycock she had been unaware that AI systems could produce hallucinated citations and did not know what a hallucinated case was. Wilson had been separately disciplined in April by the US Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Louisiana for identical conduct, leading Judge Aycock to describe her continued AI misuse as an extreme dereliction of professional responsibility. First Drafts confirmed its platform advises users that all AI-generated text and citations must be independently verified.
Williams, a partner at Christian & Small in Jackson Mississippi, used a different AI research tool that produced four fake cases across two separate filings. Her firm’s AI policy required lawyers to verify research — a requirement she disregarded. Managing partner Greer B. Mallette confirmed Christian & Small requires verification of all information in filings and will continue to educate its team on appropriate AI use.
American Bar Association president Michelle A. Behnke confirmed the ABA task force on artificial intelligence published its findings in December 2025 and issued ethics guidance on AI use in 2024, noting that lawyers understand generative AI outputs require scrutiny and oversight. The Mississippi Bar did not respond to the sanctions at the time of filing.
For law firm management and professional responsibility partners the Mississippi sanctions establish that AI hallucination liability attaches equally to lawyers who use AI without verification policies and to those who have policies but fail to follow them. The Rule 11 certification obligation does not distinguish between AI-generated errors and manually drafted ones — the professional responsibility exposure is identical.
Firms without a documented AI verification protocol, and those with protocols that are not actively enforced, face the same disciplinary risk as Wilson and Williams as AI-assisted drafting becomes standard practice across litigation teams on both sides of the Atlantic.