$110,000. The Most Expensive AI Hallucination in American Legal History.

Stephen Brigandi is a San Diego attorney. He filed three court briefs in a federal case in Oregon. The briefs contained 23 fabricated legal citations and 8 false quotations, all generated by AI. None of them existed. None were verified before filing.

On April 4, 2026, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke ordered Brigandi to pay $96,000 in direct sanctions, with total penalties against Brigandi and co-counsel exceeding $110,000. The judge called it "a notorious outlier in both degree and volume" in the expanding universe of AI sanctions cases. The client's case was dismissed with prejudice.

It gets worse. A computer forensics expert determined that a letter Brigandi claimed he had prepared in 2018 to demonstrate proper disclosure practices was actually created in 2025, months after the ethics investigation had already begun. The document was backdated. The AI fabricated the citations. The attorney fabricated the timeline.

This is not a hallucination story. It is a human oversight story. The AI generated the fake cases. The attorney filed them. Nobody checked. The judge noticed what the lawyer did not.

$110,000. The most expensive lesson in American legal history about what happens when you let AI into the courtroom without a human in the loop.