LLMMedium
Judge Reportedly Disqualifies Butler Snow Lawyers Following Purported Use of ChatGPT-Fabricated Citations in Alabama Prison Litigation
- Occurred
- May 7, 2025
- Published
- Jul 30, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Three Butler Snow attorneys defending a former Alabama corrections commissioner were reportedly disqualified after two motions cited five non-existent cases generated via ChatGPT. Judge Anna Manasco is reported to have publicly reprimanded the lawyers, referred them to the Alabama State Bar, and ordered broad disclosure; she declined to sanction the firm. An external review of 2,400 citations across 330 filings reported no further errors.
Developers
- OpenAI
Deployers
- Butler Snow
- Matthew B. Reeves
- William Cranford
- William Lunsford
Harmed parties
- Frankie Johnson
- Alabama Department of Corrections
- State of Alabama
- Butler Snow
- Matthew B. Reeves
- William Cranford
- William Lunsford
- Judicial integrity
- Epistemic integrity
- General public of Alabama
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: ChatGPT hallucinated legal citations leading to attorney disqualification and bar referral.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8