Citation Needed

Tuesday. Filing due Wednesday at four. Family law, a custody variation, nothing exotic. I'd drafted most of it. I needed two more authorities on a point about relocation and the standard of proof, and it was ten at night, and I typed the question into the tool the firm had started paying for that spring. It gave me four cases. Names, years, citations, a one-line holding for each. Beautifully formatted. The third one was exactly what I needed, an Ontario Court of Appeal decision from 2019 that, according to the summary, held precisely the thing I was arguing. I pasted it in. I wrote a paragraph around it. I went to bed. Wednesday, eleven. Final read-through. I have a habit, from articling, from a principal who terrified me, of pulling every case I cite and reading at least the headnote. It's slow. It adds an hour. I nearly skipped it that day because the paragraph read so well. I didn't skip it. The third case didn't exist. Not misattributed. Not the wrong year. The citation format was perfect and the docket number was plausible and the court was real and the case was not. I searched the name. I searched the number. I searched fragments of the quoted holding. Nothing. I went to the reporter and turned to the page. A different case entirely, about a commercial lease. I remember my hands. That's the physical memory. Not cold exactly. Just very aware of themselves on the keyboard. I checked the other three. Two were real and said roughly what the tool said they said. One was real and said the opposite. I'd been about to cite it for the proposition it rejected. So: four authorities, one fabricated, one inverted. Fifty percent. In a filing with my name on it, to a judge I appear in front of monthly, on a point that mattered to whether a seven-year-old moved provinces. I took the paragraph out. I found two real cases the old way, which took ninety minutes I didn't have. I filed at 3:51. Then I sat in my car in the parkade for a while.

Here is what I've done since, and it isn't wisdom, it's just procedure. I still use the tool. It's good at first drafts and it's very good at finding the shape of an argument. I do not let it near a citation. Anything it gives me with a case name on it is a lead, not a source, and I say that out loud in my head every time like a pilot reading a checklist. And I told the firm. That was the hard part. I sat in the managing partner's office and said, I nearly filed a fake case, and here is how, and here is how I caught it, and here is what I think we need in the policy. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Write it up. All of it. I want every associate to read it by Friday." So they did. I'm the cautionary tale now. It's fine. Somebody had to be. The kid stayed in Ontario, for what it's worth. That was the right outcome, and it happened on real law.