MD rules committee votes to crack down on fake law citations amid AI use

The Maryland Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure voted Friday to make clear that attorneys could face sanctions if they file papers with fake citations.

After a brief discussion in Annapolis, the rules committee decided unanimously to add language to an existing rule stating that an attorney’s signature on a document means that they’ve verified every authority cited. The Maryland Supreme Court would have to adopt the change.

Fake citations have never been allowed, of course, but the rule makes it explicit that the “willful” use of them could result in sanctions. The adverse party would have to file a motion requesting monetary sanctions for the cost of opposing a “bad faith” pleading. The rule would not apply to self-represented litigants.

“It’s never been okay for people to just lie in a paper or a pleading about what the facts are, about what the law is,” Maryland Appellate Judge Douglas Nazarian, who also serves as vice chair of the rules committee, said in the meeting. “The whole point of lawyers is to fight about what a case means.”

Nazarian said the rule sets a “relatively low bar — does this case even exist?”

The committee, a function of the state Supreme Court, took up the change at the urging of the Maryland Appellate Court and comes as an increasing number of attorneys have filed motions written by generative artificial intelligence that cite cases that either don’t exist or don’t support the propositions for which they are cited.

The state’s second-highest court in October referred a lawyer to the Attorney Grievance Commission and recommended that the rules committee or General Assembly consider taking action after he filed a motion “replete with citation irregularities.”

The opinion, by Appellate Judge Kathryn Graeff, marked the first time that either of the state’s appellate courts had addressed attorneys’ improper use of AI.

Bel Air lawyer Adam Hyman, who was representing a woman in a divorce case, told the court that his clerk used ChatGPT to write a brief. He told the court that he asked the clerk — a law school graduate but not a licensed attorney — if she verified each citation, but he did not verify them himself. He acknowledged that he typically does not read the cases he cites.

Graeff wrote that Hyman likely violated rules requiring competent representation, holding attorneys responsible for their employees’ work and mandating that lawyers “bring or defend only meritorious issues.”

The court denied Hyman’s request to amend the brief with real legal authorities.

Although Graeff acknowledged that Hyman had “taken steps” to prevent it from happening again, she wrote, “it would be a stretch to say that he was remorseful for his failures and the extra work that he caused in this case.”

In another case, an Alabama federal judge last year reprimanded two lawyers from the firm Butler Snow for citing fake cases in an AI-generated filing. Those lawyers had also represented Maryland in a lawsuit over jail conditions in Baltimore. One of them withdrew from the Maryland case, while the other is still listed as representing the state.

In guidance issued in May 2025, the Maryland State Bar Association stressed the importance of human fact-checking. It noted that attorneys are obligated to provide competent representation, maintain client confidentiality, disclose the use of generative AI tools to clients and charge reasonable fees.