CoCounsel again, same matter, a later brief. The fabrication repeated.
This is the second sanctions order in Hill v. Workday, and it focuses on Attorney Lenden Webb, the supervising lawyer whose name appeared on the July 2025 discovery brief that cited the nonexistent South Pointe Wholesale v. Vilardi case and misrepresented the holding of Mir v. L-3 Communications. The court had already sanctioned the associate who signed the brief, Katherine Cervantes, in a September 5, 2025 order.
Webb missed the first show-cause hearing and did not respond to the September 5 order, so the court issued a further order to show cause in October. Webb finally responded on October 23, appeared at a November 4 hearing, and filed a further declaration in April 2026. He admitted he was the firm's namesake and Cervantes's supervisor, that he did not read or check the brief, and that he did not supervise her use of the AI tool. He tried to minimize the fake citation as a "single and isolated event."
The court found the brief contained a fake citation caused in part by AI use and a failure of supervision, and rejected the argument that one fabricated citation is exempt from sanctions.
Offered for: supporting authority in the brief
The court admonished and sanctioned Webb. It ordered him to circulate the orders and responses to everyone at his firm, complete at least four hours of in-person CLE on supervision and AI ethics, and distribute the CLE materials to firm staff. Crediting his remedial steps, the court still personally sanctioned him $1,001, payable by him alone and not the firm, by May 22, 2026, with a copy of the order attached to the payment. It retained jurisdiction pending compliance.
Kingsfield returned REJECT. A second filing in the same case cited a nonexistent decision. The court found the citation fabricated and tied it to AI use.
This matter is among the US case-law cases we ran Kingsfield against in the Charlotin benchmark. Kingsfield's existence check confirms every citation against the case-law corpus and an independent source (CourtListener) before any claim resting on it can stand. Across the run Kingsfield ruled 696 of 700 testable claims correctly, including every one of the 504 fabricated citations and 92 fabricated quotes.
Honest scope. This measures Kingsfield's ruling layer given an extracted citation, not an end-to-end run over a full brief. The case record and the AI-tool attribution come from Damien Charlotin's public database and the court order; the verdict is Kingsfield's. See the full 700-claim benchmark.