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Minnesota Attorney Reportedly Used AI-Generated Fabricated Citations in Hennepin County Civil Case and Agreed to 30-Day Suspension

August 21, 2025

A recent incident highlights concerns regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for legal research. Minnesota attorney Faisal S. Ahmed reportedly filed a 2025 legal memorandum containing AI-generated legal authorities that included invented cases and an inaccurate quotation from an actual decision. The errors reportedly burdened opposing counsel and the Hennepin County District Court, which later fined Ahmed $5,000. He subsequently agreed to a 30-day suspension of his law license and $900 in costs. Through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more about responsible AI practices and how they can impact legal proceedings, it is essential for attorneys to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in AI governance and trustworthy AI.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
lawyers, faisal-s.-ahmed
Alleged developer
large-language-model-developers
Alleged harmed parties
judicial-integrity, hennepin-county-district-court, george-warner-jr., faisal-s.-ahmed, epistemic-integrity

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1667

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.