Reported / Citable
Background
The Lipeles Law Group (LLG) found itself in an embarrassing position of its own making: it had filed two nearly identical wage-and-hour class actions against the same defendants — one in Los Angeles County in June 2024, and a second in San Francisco County in December 2024 — apparently without realizing within its own firm that it had already filed the first. When Harbor Distributing moved to stay the San Francisco action under California’s doctrine of exclusive concurrent jurisdiction (which gives priority to the first-filed case), LLG outsourced the opposition brief to a contract attorney, James Sansone, without supervising the work or reading it before filing.
The results were catastrophic. The brief cited two cases that did not exist, and contained no fewer than eight quotations attributed to real California cases — quotations that, as the trial court put it in bold type, were “entirely fabricated, invented, they don’t exist.” Virtually every other citation in the brief misrepresented the actual holdings of the cases cited, in some instances arguing for a legal rule that was the “exact inverse” of what those cases actually said. The trial court described it as “the worst example of misconduct by a lawyer that I think I’ve ever seen since I’ve been on the bench” and issued an order to show cause why sanctions should not be imposed.
At the hearing, LLG’s principals admitted they had never read the brief, were unaware their own firm had filed the Los Angeles action, and had simply assumed Sansone’s work was accurate based on his prior track record. Sansone denied using AI and claimed to have triple-checked all citations through Lexis — a claim the court found “entirely lacking in credibility.” The court imposed $5,000 payable to Harbor and $1,000 payable to the court, jointly and severally against the firm and the three named attorneys. LLG appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The First District Court of Appeal, Division Two affirmed on all grounds, finding LLG had forfeited every procedural challenge and that sanctions were well within the trial court’s discretion.
On forfeiture: LLG argued on appeal that the court failed to give it the 21-day “safe harbor” period under Code of Civil Procedure § 128.7(c)(2) — time to withdraw an offending filing before sanctions are imposed. The court rejected this entirely: LLG never raised the safe harbor issue in the trial court, and arguments not raised below are waived. The court also rejected LLG’s challenge to the portion of sanctions ordered paid to Harbor (rather than to the court), for the same reason. Forfeiture rules exist precisely to let trial courts correct errors in real time, and LLG had multiple opportunities — including after receiving Harbor’s reply, after the court issued its tentative, and at the hearing itself — to withdraw the opposition or raise procedural objections, and did none of those things.
On the merits of the sanctions: the court found no abuse of discretion. Submitting a brief peppered with fabricated quotations and nonexistent citations violates § 128.7(b)(2)’s certification that legal contentions are warranted by existing law, as well as Rules of Professional Conduct 3.1, 3.3(a)(1), and 3.3(a)(2). The court emphasized a growing body of California law making clear that counsel of record — not a contract drafter, not an AI tool — bears ultimate responsibility for every filing. As the court quoted from its own prior decision in Noland v. Land of the Free (2025): “Simply stated, 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.”
Key Takeaways
- Attorneys of record bear ultimate, non-delegable responsibility for the accuracy of every brief they sign, regardless of whether a contract attorney, staff lawyer, or AI tool drafted it. “I didn’t write it” is not a defense.
- Filing a brief containing fabricated AI-generated citations or quotations attributed to real cases is sanctionable under Code of Civil Procedure § 128.7 — and arguably more insidious than citing hallucinated cases, because fake quotations in real cases are harder for courts and opposing counsel to detect.
- Procedural challenges to a § 128.7 sanctions order (including safe harbor violations and the direction of payment) must be raised in the trial court or they are forfeited on appeal.
- Before outsourcing any law-and-motion work, supervising attorneys should read the draft, verify citations independently, and confirm they understand the legal argument being advanced. Assumptions about a contract attorney’s competence are no substitute for review.
- The $6,000 joint-and-several sanction here was below the $10,000 sanction in the 2025 Noland case; the court suggested the amount was reasonable given the egregious conduct, and that it saw “no error” in the amount.
Why It Matters
This decision is the latest in a rapidly growing line of California cases holding attorneys personally accountable for AI-related filing misconduct. What makes Quinteros notable is that it extends that accountability to supervising attorneys who outsource work and never review it — and it does so in the context of sophisticated wage-and-hour litigation where the errors were thoroughgoing and apparently systematic. For any California attorney who relies on contract lawyers, legal research services, or generative AI tools to draft briefs, the message is unambiguous: you must personally read and verify every case citation and quotation before filing.
The decision is also a useful reminder about the doctrine of exclusive concurrent jurisdiction. The underlying error — filing a duplicative class action against the same defendants in a second forum — is a basic mistake that should have been caught at intake. When a firm doesn’t even know what cases it has already filed, the resulting chaos (including a fabricated brief opposing a stay that should never have been contested) creates liability far beyond the cost of a modest sanctions award. California’s wage-and-hour plaintiffs’ bar would do well to treat this case as a cautionary tale about docket management and case assignment workflows.