MANHATTAN (LN) — A Manhattan federal magistrate judge on Tuesday sanctioned attorney Tricia S. Lindsay $2,500 under Rule 11 after concluding she submitted two opposition briefs riddled with fabricated case citations that she could not coherently explain, determining that the citations were generated by an AI program she failed to verify.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein, writing in Jimenez-Fogarty v. Fogarty, concluded that Lindsay's June 2025 memoranda of law opposing motions to dismiss contained citations to cases that either did not exist at all or bore no relationship to the propositions for which they were cited. Among the examples: a citation to "Cornhill LLC v. Sowers, 183 A.D.3d 649 (2d Dept. 2020)" purportedly upholding nail-and-mail service, which turned out to be a citation to an entirely unrelated case, Matter of Goodine v. Evans. A citation to "Nagib v. News Syndicate Co., 413 N.Y.S.2d 108 (1st Dep't 1978)" for the proposition that special service procedures for judges are baseless pointed instead to an unrelated 1979 case, Matter of Depew Union Free School Dist. v Depew Teachers Org. A citation to "Koulkina v. City of New York" for the proposition that courts uphold service on clerks designated to receive process for judicial officers matched no case at the database identifier given, and none of the three Koulkina cases on Westlaw supported the proposition.
When the court ordered Lindsay to provide a complete and detailed description of how the briefs were drafted and what role any computer system played, she responded with what Gorenstein called "airy generalities and conclusory statements." She attested that she "manually cross-check[s] case names, docket numbers, and reporter citations against the primary sources in legal databases" — a claim the court flatly rejected as obviously false given that any manual check would have instantly revealed the fabrications.
Lindsay never named the AI tool responsible. In her initial response she attributed the errors to "typographical errors, misreading of secondary sources, or limitations in the search functionality of legal databases." Only after defendant Emily Hirshowitz weighed in did Lindsay mention for the first time that she "routinely utilizes Lexis Nexis['s] . . . AI-driven features" and that the citations "may very well have been generated by the Lexis Nexis software during the research phase" — without providing any specifics about which features she used or how they could have produced the fabrications.
Gorenstein concluded that left only two plausible explanations: a person who deliberately created the citations knowing they were fabricated, or an AI system. Because Lindsay denied any human assistance and declared herself "solely responsible for the research, drafting, and review of the memoranda at issue," the court concluded she used an AI program and failed to check its output.
The court held that bad faith — the standard required for sua sponte Rule 11 sanctions — was established, citing a line of circuit precedent holding that presenting AI-generated hallucinations as valid caselaw constitutes subjective bad faith. Gorenstein also pointed to Lindsay's minimizing language throughout her responses — including her assertion that "Citation errors, while regrettable, are not uncommon in complex litigation" — as reflecting a complete lack of acceptance of responsibility.
The bad faith finding was reinforced by what happened after the court issued its show-cause orders. In September 2025, Lindsay filed a brief in the Second Circuit containing fabricated citations; the appeals court in Ioio v. City of New York referred her and co-counsel Jo Saint-George to its Grievance Panel for further investigation, citing both the false citations and a separate concern that counsel had purported to represent as a plaintiff someone who expressly asked not to be involved. The following month, Lindsay filed objections in the same district court case containing eight citations that opposing counsel identified as false, fake, or hallucinated. Lindsay withdrew those citations without admitting liability and without explaining how they got there.
Gorenstein declined to award attorneys' fees to Hirshowitz, finding no record evidence that her counsel expended significant effort tracking down the fabricated citations in connection with the underlying motion to dismiss. The court noted it was the attorney for co-defendants Judge Sherri Eisenpress and Judge Thomas Zugibe who first alerted the court to the problem.
Beyond the $2,500 fine, Gorenstein ordered Lindsay to deliver a copy of the opinion to her client and to file a letter on the docket in every pending case where she appears as attorney of record, alerting the presiding judge to the sanctions ruling and serving the letter on opposing counsel. All deadlines run to May 14, 2026.
As of the opinion's issuance, a tracker maintained by researcher Damien Charlotin had identified 916 proceedings in U.S. courts involving citations to nonexistent cases likely hallucinated by AI, including 342 where lawyers supplied the offending citations.