Imagine you're on trial, and the lawyer arguing against you tells the judge, "A court already settled a case exactly like this one, and here's what they ruled." The judge goes to look it up. There's nothing there. No case, no decision, no words. A computer program made the whole thing up, and a Justice Department lawyer copied it down and handed it to a federal judge as if it were real law. The case the whole argument leaned on had never existed.
Here's why that's a big deal: this wasn't one sloppy lawyer working out of a strip mall. A researcher who keeps count has already logged around 1,800 of these fake-citation cases worldwide, more than 1,200 in the U.S. alone, up from just a few hundred a year ago. And the names on the list aren't nobodies. They include the Justice Department itself and a Wall Street firm that's been practicing since before the telephone existed. The people we trust most to know the law are quietly letting a machine write it for them, and almost nobody is checking its work.