The legal field is paying increasing attention to artificial intelligence. In May of 2025, a federal court ordered attorneys to pay $31,100 in fines for submitting a brief with AI-hallucinated citations (the AI tools cited cases that didn’t exist). Three months later, a different court decided that monetary sanctions were not punishment enough: after several attorneys submitted a brief with hallucinated cites, the judge removed them from representing their client entirely. Now, the California legislature wants to go even further.
California Senate Bill 574 would require an attorney to personally check every citation in a legal brief they submit to the court. The legislation aims to, among other things, prevent AIs from hallucinating (citing nonexistent cases). But the bill could have costly ramifications unrelated to AI. If enforced, SB 574 threatens the ability for law firms to work in teams, with paralegals or junior attorneys checking citations. The attorneys who sign and submit briefs are often partners or other senior lawyers billing $1,000 or more per hour. Preventing them from delegating time-consuming tasks like cite-checking could cost clients thousands of dollars a week and make legal representation inaccessible to many Californians.
Fortunately, minor amendments to the bill’s language could bring this proposed law into line with longstanding precedent and protect the norm of teamwork. The legislature need not implement a process-based rule (review every citation yourself) to deter hallucination. In fact, existing California law already provides for a product-based deterrent against relying on nonexistent cases: judges can sanction attorneys if the final product (legal brief) they submit to the court cites a fabricated ruling.
SB 574 would also regulate two other areas of legal AI, confidentiality and arbitration, but this analysis will focus on the citation-checking provisions. On this topic, the bill adds just one substantive paragraph to the California Code of Civil Procedure (commonly known as the “CCP”):
A brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court shall not contain any citations that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified, including any citation provided by generative artificial intelligence.
This is a marked departure from precedent and norms. One might assume that lawyers already review their briefs for perfection, but the reality involves much more teamwork. As a litigation legal assistant at a California law firm where many attorneys billed more than $1,400 per hour, I learned why delegation was key. Clients are hesitant to pay exorbitant rates just for a Partner to check citations for multiple hours. To minimize costs, law firms divide and conquer. Junior attorneys usually draft a brief, including finding case law to cite. Senior attorneys offer revisions to the brief. In this process, they may recognize some commonly cited cases, and they may read some of the unfamiliar cases cited by the junior attorney, but the final review of the brief before submission to the court almost never involves the senior attorney checking citations. Instead, legal assistants or paralegals use Westlaw or similar databases to confirm that the cited cases exist and pertain to the lawsuit at hand. SB 574, if enforced as plainly written, would upend this division of labor. Typically, senior attorneys are the ones who sign briefs, and legal assistants or paralegals digitally submit the brief to a court (“file”) using the senior attorney’s login credentials. This bill would require the signing/filing attorney to review every citation themselves, not only prohibiting the use of AI to check cites, but also preventing paralegals and even other attorneys from doing the final review of citations.
Such stringent requirements are not necessary to deter hallucinations. The section of California law that SB 574 modifies, California Code of Civil Procedure Section 128.7, already requires that an attorney who signs a brief and submits it to the court “is certifying that to the best of the person's knowledge … [that the] claims, defenses, and other legal contentions therein are warranted by existing law” [emphasis added]. This already confers a product-based responsibility on the signing attorney; if a brief (the final product) contains nonexistent case law, Section 128.7 allows courts to impose monetary penalties on the attorney. We can contrast this with SB 574’s process-based rule: check all citations yourself.
Product-based punishment for fabricated citations was the norm until a 2025 ruling in California. In Noland v. Land of the Free, L.P., a California State appeals court held that “no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations—whether provided by generative AI or any other source—that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified.” This language is nearly identical to the language of SB 574. While the bill may seek to codify this recent case, no previous California case law has held that attorneys must personally review every citation. Such a requirement runs counter to guidance from the American Bar Association, which recognizes that many tasks may not require word-for-word attorney review.
In fact, several cases cited in the Noland decision support an approach that is product-based rather than process-based. Instead of requiring attorneys to review every citation, previous courts have merely sanctioned attorneys if their briefs contain hallucinated cases. These federal judges—Hon. Anna M. Manasco, Special Master Hon. Michael R. Wilner (Ret.), and Hon. Susie Morgan—are wise to recognize that existing rules already provide a toolkit for deterring caselaw hallucinations. We need not add a law to California’s books that makes senior attorneys verify every one of their partners’ and staff’s citations.
As SB 574 moves from the California Senate to the Assembly, legislators should consider removing the citation-checking provision from the bill, recognizing that existing laws already provide remedies for hallucinations. The legislature ought to further modify Section 128.7 to state that, contrary to the court’s interpretation in Noland, the Section does not require a personal reading of every citation. That said, the bill could certainly retain a provision clarifying that existing rules apply to citations generated by AI. These minimal changes would protect the longstanding norm of delegation while preserving courts’ tools to penalize AI hallucinations of caselaw.
