Careless Use of AI
Lawyers & Litigants
AI has often been criticized for sycophancy and over confidence. These tendencies create issues when the AI is confidently wrong: often creating an AI “hallucination.” Hallucinations are AI fabrications and they can surface in law documents as made-up citations, quotes, or cases. As attorneys increasingly embrace the use of AI, courts across the country have flagged more than a thousand filings containing AI-generated errors. Consequences to these attorneys including financial penalties, dismissed claims, referrals to state bar regulators, and orders to pay the other side’s attorney fees in others.
What began as embarrassing mistakes is now financial liability. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, courts imposed at least $145,000 in AI-related sanctions. Judges are increasingly framing these awards not just as punishment, but as reimbursement to the opposing party for the time and money wasted responding to fabricated arguments.
In Colorado specifically, courts have made clear that they are watching. In a 2024 first-of-its kind ruling, the Colorado Court of Appeals issued a warning to self-represented litigants and lawyers to take caution when using AI. The federal appeals court that covers Colorado has already acted on that warning. In Amarsingh v. Frontier Airlines, Inc. (Feb. 2026), the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered an attorney to pay $1,000 in the opposing party’s attorney fees after she filed a brief with seven nonexistent cases and a fabricated quote drawn from unverified ChatGPT output and referred her to bar regulators. As the court put it, AI use generally is not the problem but the careless use of the tool wastes judicial resources and the other side’s time and money.
Persons & Entities
These same issues are also present outside the courtroom. People are increasingly using AI to draft their own contracts, leases, and business agreements, often without understanding the tool’s limits. AI can produce language that sounds authoritative but is vague, internally contradictory, based on the wrong state’s law, or missing terms that matter. These problems frequently surface only once a dispute has already begun. AI’s speed in drafting does not equate to accurate or deft drafting. This is a lesson people, businesses, and lawyers alike are learning the hard way.
A New Flavor of Litigation We Can Handle
If you have experienced the repercussions of an attorney or other person’s misuse of AI—or even if you yourself misused AI and now need legal representation—the attorneys at Flanders, Elsberg, Herber & Dunn, LLC, are experienced in this issue and can help clients navigate contracts, disputes, and litigation with the care and verification these matters demand. If you are facing a legal issue—or want to make sure an important agreement is done right the first time—we invite you to reach out to our experienced team for reliable representation. From this chaos emerges a distinction between those who use AI carefully and those who do not. And as with any issue, this creates a new type of litigation: one against those who carelessly use AI in drafting, research, and preparation.
