The correction introduced a fresh set of fiction

Attorney Anthony F. Sabatini filed an opening brief in the Eleventh Circuit containing at least eight nonexistent cases. One of the supposed decisions was attributed to the same federal appeals court reading the brief. Opposing counsel identified the problem. Sabatini then acknowledged that citations were erroneous or unverifiable and tried to withdraw eight listed authorities in an untimely proposed reply.

The proposed correction did not name any of the eight fabricated cases from the opening brief. Its list contained eight different cases, all of which were also fabricated. One case name appeared in both filings, but the proposed reply assigned it to a different court. The correction therefore managed to miss the original error while providing a second demonstration of it.

The court published those findings on July 10, 2026, in Akerlund v. Atlas Air. It affirmed dismissal of the plaintiffs' lawsuit and ordered that Sabatini be referred to the court's Committee on Lawyer Qualifications and Conduct. That committee reviews lawyers' fitness and professional conduct before the court. The opinion made the referral; it did not announce a final disciplinary penalty or dollar sanction.

A weak employment case arrived with weaker authorities

The plaintiffs worked in commercial aviation and challenged pandemic-era vaccination, testing, and masking policies used by Atlas Air and Flight Services International. Some accepted vaccination under pressure; others wore masks and underwent testing. The complaint did not allege that anyone lost a job, though some plaintiffs said they received less desirable or lower-paying flights.

Their claims included a hostile work environment based on religion, unlawful use of emergency medical products, constitutional violations, privacy claims, and emotional distress. The district court dismissed the case for lack of personal jurisdiction over one defendant and failure to state a viable claim against the other.

The Eleventh Circuit found the claims implausible for ordinary legal reasons. The complaint did not plead facts showing religious hostility, private parties were not transformed into government officers merely by following federal contractor policy, and internal handling of vaccination status did not amount to public disclosure. The fabricated cases did not rescue those defects.

That context prevents an easy but unsupported causal claim. The appeal was not lost because the court discovered fake authorities. The panel found the pleaded claims deficient on their merits. The hallucinated citations still damaged the clients' representation and imposed verification work on opposing counsel and the court.

Plausible formatting borrowed the court's time

A legal citation is an address for a judicial opinion. It identifies a court, year, volume, reporter, page, or electronic database number so another person can retrieve the decision and inspect its reasoning. Generative systems can produce case names and citations with the correct visual shape even when no corresponding judgment exists.

The opening brief included fabricated Florida and federal authorities, complete with convincing reporter and database references. A reader checking only grammar and formatting could mistake them for ordinary citations. A competent legal review opens the source, confirms that the case exists, reads the relevant passage, and checks whether the decision supports the claim made in the brief.

Sabatini's proposed withdrawal showed that the process failed again after the warning. He did not merely overlook a bad citation during initial drafting. The filing meant to correct the record named a wholly different collection of nonexistent cases. The court called the conduct blatant and repeated, distinguishing it from the more common pattern in which a lawyer apologizes after one contaminated filing.

The court attributed the filings to unverified AI work

The opinion said Sabatini had outsourced legal work to an artificial-intelligence algorithm and signed briefs filled with hallucinated citations twice. In this context, a hallucination is generated information presented as fact despite lacking a real source. The court tied that use directly to professional duties of competence and candor.

Lawyers may use research and drafting tools, including generative ones. Signing the result remains a personal representation that the filing has been investigated and is supportable. The tool cannot carry the lawyer's license, professional judgment, or obligation to the court. A generated citation list is a set of search leads until every authority has been retrieved and checked.

The court also described why the failure interferes with appellate work. Judges read briefs because counsel are expected to present their best supported account of the law. Fake authorities divert that effort into proving that a source never existed. They also force an opponent to spend client time searching databases and responding to propositions that have no legal foundation.

A referral is a consequence, not a completed penalty

The opinion directed a separate referral through the chief judge to the Committee on Lawyer Qualifications and Conduct. That is a formal professional consequence. It places the lawyer's conduct before the body that can investigate and recommend action under the court's rules.

Reporting should stop at the procedural line the opinion establishes. The referral does not prove that the committee will impose suspension, a fine, or another specific sanction. Those outcomes require a later decision. The published rebuke, affirmed dismissal, and referral are substantial without borrowing a penalty from the future.

Citation checking is one of the easiest AI controls to describe because courts already built the necessary infrastructure. Search the official docket or a reputable legal database. Open the judgment. Compare the cited proposition with the holding. Confirm that later decisions have not reversed or limited it. If the authority cannot be found, it does not go into the brief.

A second generated list cannot repair an unchecked first list. The correction must begin with the filed document and identify each defective statement precisely. Sabatini's proposed reply skipped that basic reconciliation and supplied another batch of fiction. The Eleventh Circuit was left to document the mismatch in a published opinion, ensuring that these imaginary cases finally acquired one genuine citation: the case explaining that they never existed.