Imagine your house burns, then the rain comes through what's left of the roof, and the insurance company fights you over the bill. You hire a lawyer, they hire a lawyer, and the whole thing lands in front of a judge who's supposed to sort out who owes what. Then it turns out the insurance company's lawyer handed the judge three court cases that never happened. A made-up 1996 case, a made-up 2021 case, and a made-up case with State Farm's own name on it, all invented by a computer and all used to argue the homeowner shouldn't get paid.
Here's why that's a big deal: judges decide your case by looking at what other judges already decided. That's the whole system. The lawyer used an AI tool to find those older rulings and never opened a single one to check it was real, so the fake ones sailed straight into a real courtroom. The only reason anyone caught it was that the homeowner's lawyer sat down and read them. If he'd been busy that week, a woman who lost her home could have lost her case to three cases that don't exist. The lawyer told the court she had no excuse, only an apology, and she's right. But the apology came after the filing, and the next one might come after a ruling.