Two Lawyers Got Sanctioned by a Federal Appeals Court, and Nobody Would Say If AI Wrote the Briefs
What happened
In March 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit sanctioned attorneys Van Irion and Russ Egli over their conduct in Whiting v. City of Athens. Reviewers of the appellate briefs reportedly found more than two dozen fake citations and alleged factual misrepresentations embedded in the filings. The court issued formal sanctions, one of the more serious professional consequences available to a federal appellate court, against both attorneys.
The citations that triggered the sanction were not minor technical errors or misread case names. They were references with hallmarks consistent with fabrication: case citations that did not exist, materials described in ways the actual record did not support. Public reporting described the filings as bearing recognizable patterns of AI hallucinations, the kind of plausible-sounding but invented legal authority that generative tools produce when asked to support an argument they cannot genuinely substantiate.
The Sixth Circuit asked the attorneys directly whether generative AI had been used in drafting the briefs. Neither Van Irion nor Egli reportedly answered the question. That silence became its own kind of answer. It left the court unable to determine whether the defects were the result of deliberate fabrication, negligent reliance on an automated tool, or some combination of both, a distinction that matters for how sanctions are calibrated and what remedies a bar association might pursue.
Appellate briefs carry particular weight in the legal system. They arrive in front of judges who rely on the cited authority to evaluate arguments, often without independent verification of every citation. A brief that floods the record with invented precedent does not just mislead one judge; it can distort an entire panel's analysis of what the law actually says. The damage from fabricated citations compounds because other parties may spend time and resources trying to locate or distinguish authority that never existed.
What the Whiting sanctions expose is a verification gap that courts have not yet closed. Attorneys who submit AI-assisted work are not currently required to disclose that fact, and no mechanism compels them to produce a provable record of what a system generated versus what they independently verified. When that record is absent, a court can sanction the outcome but cannot trace the process that produced it. Closing that gap requires not just professional ethics guidance, but enforceable disclosure standards that travel with the filing itself.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
- Not publicly disclosed
- Scale
- Not publicly disclosed
- Financial impact
- Not publicly disclosed
- Regulatory action
- Not publicly disclosed
Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
Not publicly disclosed
Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index. The event is also catalogued in the following database, which is listed for cross-reference.