On November 4, 2026, I spoke to the DuPage County Bar Association about how I use AI in a catastrophic injury and wrongful death practice, and I'm starting this post the same way I started the talk. The slides were drafted with Claude, and before I walked into the room I opened every opinion, rule and order in them and checked every quotation against the source. That's really the whole talk, and it's why the last slide told the room to use it, verify it and own it. What follows is the substance for the lawyers who were there and for the ones who weren't.
In July 2025 the Fourth District decided In re Baby Boy, 2025 IL App (4th) 241427, where an appointed lawyer handling an accelerated appeal from a termination of parental rights filed briefs citing eight cases that did not exist, one of them with a direct quotation. Every one of those citations was formatted perfectly, which is exactly what makes a fabricated citation dangerous, because it doesn't look fabricated.
The lawyer admitted he "used artificial intelligence (AI) to write a draft of the brief" and never read the cases that were supposed to support it (¶ 48), and the court found that "At a minimum, this conduct constitutes inexcusable carelessness" (¶ 115). He was ordered to disgorge the $6,925.62 the county had paid him and to pay $1,000 to the clerk, and the opinion was sent to the ARDC.
A year later the First District raised the price in Scott v. Illinois Human Rights Comm'n, 2026 IL App (1st) 251462. The lawyer there used a paid corporate ChatGPT subscription and said he cross-checked his citations on Lexis, yet his briefs contained ten false citations, including four false statutory quotations, one case that does not exist and five real cases that did not contain the principle or language he cited them for (¶ 56). The court made clear that "no matter how much one pays for 'premier' or 'corporate' versions of AI products," every citation still has to be verified (¶ 57), and it warned that "Courts have no choice but to increase fines for AI-hallucinated citations" until the fines deter (¶ 58). The lawyer was fined $15,000 and referred to the ARDC, and the court set the standard in a single sentence when it wrote, "The only acceptable standard is zero false citations" (¶ 48).
The wrong lesson to take from these cases is to stay away from the tools, and Baby Boy says so itself in the paragraph right after the sanction, where the court wrote, "To be clear, nothing in this opinion is intended to categorically forbid attorneys from using AI tools" (¶ 131). The problem in that case was a lawyer who signed a brief he hadn't read.
The Illinois Supreme Court has said the same thing. Its Policy on Artificial Intelligence, effective January 1, 2025, says the use of AI by litigants, attorneys and judges "should not be discouraged, and is authorized provided it complies with legal and ethical standards," and that "Disclosure of AI use should not be required in a pleading." The policy also puts the responsibility on the person who signs, because "Attorneys, judges, and self-represented litigants are accountable for their final work product," and "All users must thoroughly review AI-generated content before submitting it in any court proceeding."
Illinois doesn't have an AI rule, and it doesn't need one, because Rule 137(a) already says that a lawyer's signature "constitutes a certificate by him that he has read the pleading, motion or other document; that to the best of his knowledge, information, and belief formed after reasonable inquiry it is well grounded in fact and is warranted by existing law." A fake case isn't existing law. Some individual courtrooms in Illinois have gone further than the statewide policy with standing orders that require disclosure of AI-drafted filings or set rules for AI-generated evidence, so read the standing order for every courtroom you appear in.
I tell lawyers to treat every AI output as a draft from a brilliant first-year associate who has never opened a reporter, never saw your file until you handed it over, writes with total confidence and won't tell you when he's guessing. You would never file that associate's draft without reading every case and checking every quote, and the same rule applies here, because the tool is faster and more fluent than any associate you've had and fluency isn't accuracy.
There are two ground rules before any of the workflows below. First, use business accounts only, with written terms that the vendor won't train on what you upload and that let you control retention, because intake packets and medical records are protected health information and the Supreme Court's policy says "AI applications must not compromise sensitive information, such as confidential communications." Second, anything the tool produces is a finding aid that points you to a source.
A catastrophic injury file often arrives with thousands of pages of medical records from a half-dozen providers, and the questions are always what happened, when it happened and where it is in the record. The records go into the tool on the firm's business plan, and I ask for a dated chronology with a page cite on every entry, a list of gaps and a list of inconsistencies between providers. It comes back in minutes, and the gaps are usually the most valuable part, whether that's a missing imaging report, six weeks with no treatment or a therapy discharge that never happened.
Every entry I'm going to use in a demand, a deposition, an expert's packet or a brief gets opened against the page it cites, because the summary never replaces the record. The chronology is my work product, and discovery answers are still drafted by a person from the records and then read and sworn to by the client line by line.
A 300-page transcript becomes a page-line digest by topic in a few minutes, and from that digest I build the cross outline for the next witness, with every question carrying the transcript cite I'll impeach with. When I argue from testimony in a brief, I argue from the verbatim question and answer, and the digest is only how I find it. Before a page-line cite goes into a brief or onto an outline, I open the transcript to that page.
Preparing yourself is different from preparing a witness, and that's where I draw a hard line. A witness never gets AI-generated or AI-suggested answers, because that's coaching with a new tool, and I wouldn't wait for a standing order before adopting that rule in your own office.
Every one of these published opinions started with research, so it's the workflow I'm strictest about. First, I ask the tool for the issue, the leading cases and the counterarguments, and I treat what comes back as a lead sheet rather than an answer. Second, I open every case on the court's own site or in the reporter, which for Illinois means illinoiscourts.gov or a full-text source that carries the opinion itself rather than a summary or a headnote. Third, I quote from the opinion with the pin cite, and my rule for research memos is direct quotes only from cases I've read, because three cases with direct quotes beat ten I'm not sure about. Fourth, I run the finished brief through a citator.
A citator will catch a case that doesn't exist or one that was reversed, but it won't catch a real case cited for something it doesn't say, and that's the failure you'll see most often. Scott had five of them, and the only way to catch that kind of mistake is to read the case.
Once you can name the failure, you can build the check for it. A citator catches the invented case but not the real case cited for the wrong holding, so that one has to be read. An invented quotation has to be checked word for word against the source, and because the tool has no sense of time, every authority has to be checked for currency and subsequent history before you rely on it.
Read every case the other side cites, in full. When a cited page doesn't say what their brief says it does, put it in writing for the court with the proposition claimed, what the cited page actually says and the pin cite, and hand up the pages. Facts and page cites do the work rather than adjectives, so don't say "AI" or "hallucinated," and don't threaten Rule 137 or an ethics complaint at the podium or in the hallway. Rule 8.4(g) makes threatening disciplinary charges to gain an advantage in a civil matter misconduct, so it is never leverage, and whether to seek Rule 137 sanctions is a separate decision made in writing after the ruling.
If your firm has nothing in writing, eight lines will get you started. Approve the tools and keep them on business accounts, decide what may go into them, and require that every citation be read at the source, every quotation be checked and every finished brief go through a citator, with the signer responsible for the verification. Check each courtroom's standing order, train and supervise the people who are already using these tools, and bill the time actually spent rather than the time saved. Never give a witness AI-generated answers, preserve every original, and when something slips through, correct it in writing the same day, because the sanctions cases turn on what the lawyer did after he was put on notice.
Use it, because the Supreme Court expects you to and the lawyer across the aisle already is. Verify it, because the First District's standard is zero. And own it, because your signature is the certificate.
Related reading: Understanding the Difference Between Discovery Depositions and Evidence Depositions
Related reading: Illinois Appellate Court Permits Discovery Deposition of Deceased Defendant to be Admitted as Evidence at Trial
Related reading: The Supreme Court Just Changed the Game for Trucking Crash Victims
John D. Risvold is an equity partner at Collins Law Group, P.C. in Naperville, Illinois. He represents individuals and families in catastrophic personal injury and wrongful death cases, focusing on commercial trucking crashes, rideshare and autonomous vehicle litigation, medical malpractice and birth injury, and product defect claims. He has tried cases to verdict in Illinois courts, recovered more than $50 million for clients over thirteen years of practice, and has been named to Best Lawyers in America for Personal Injury Litigation and Illinois Super Lawyers.
This article is for lawyers and is not legal advice. The cases and rules it cites were read at the source before publication, and you should read them yourself before relying on them.
