LLMMedium
Four Lawyers Reportedly Sanctioned After Purportedly AI-Related Hallucinated Citations Appeared in Withers v. City of Aberdeen
- Occurred
- Nov 5, 2025
- Published
- Jun 9, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
In Withers v. City of Aberdeen, a federal judge in Mississippi reportedly sanctioned four lawyers after filings from both sides contained purportedly hallucinated legal citations linked to unverified AI use. The court said Kathleen Wilson used First Drafts to draft a filing and Kathryn Williams used an AI legal-research tool; all four attorneys were removed from the case and fined.
Developers
- Large language model developers
- First Drafts
- AI research tool developers
Deployers
- Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway
- Mark McClinton
- Lawyers
- Kathryn Y. Williams
- Kathleen M. Wilson
Harmed parties
- Tom Withers III
- Judicial integrity
- Epistemic integrity
- City of Aberdeen, Mississippi
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: AI hallucinations led to sanctions, fitting LLM failure category with medium severity due to legal consequences.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8