LLMHigh
Westlaw CoCounsel Reportedly Generated False Legal Quotations in United States v. Farris
- Occurred
- Oct 21, 2025
- Published
- Apr 9, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
In United States v. Farris, court-appointed attorney Steven N. Howe admitted using Westlaw CoCounsel to draft appellate briefs that reportedly included AI-generated false quotations and misleading descriptions of precedent. The filing disrupted Farris's appeal, leading the court to appoint new counsel and restart briefing, while Howe lost his compensation and faced possible disciplinary action.
Developers
- Thomson Reuters
- Large language model developers
- AI research tool developers
Deployers
- Steven N. Howe
- Legal professionals
- Law firms
Harmed parties
- United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
- Legal clients
- Judicial integrity
- John C. Farris
- Epistemic integrity
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: AI-generated false legal quotations caused court disruption and disciplinary action against attorney.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8