Four Lawyers Reportedly Sanctioned After Purportedly AI-Related Hallucinated Citations Appeared in Withers v. City of Aberdeen

November 5, 2025

In a recent development in the federal case of Withers v. City of Aberdeen, four lawyers were reportedly sanctioned after filings from both sides contained purportedly hallucinated legal citations linked to unverified AI use. The court said Kathleen Wilson used First Drafts to draft a filing and Kathryn Williams used an AI legal-research tool; all four attorneys were removed from the case and fined.

HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM suggests that the incident highlights the need for stricter AI governance guidelines to prevent similar incidents in the future. Contributors—JOIN US—to learn more about responsible AI practices and how to mitigate such risks are encouraged to engage with HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM.

Alleged deployer

shauncey-hunter-ridgeway, mark-mcclinton, lawyers, kathryn-y.-williams, kathleen-m.-wilson

Alleged developer

large-language-model-developers, first-drafts, ai-legal-research-tool-developers

Alleged harmed parties

tom-withers-iii, judicial-integrity, epistemic-integrity, city-of-aberdeen-mississippi

AI governance case studies

For forensic AI governance failure analysis (TAIMScore™ case studies), browse Human Signal’s Failure Files™.

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.