Rosario Aguilar v. The Crawford Group, Inc.
Episode 12
The case
The five-hour brief. Blake Lindemann answered a motion to strike with a twenty-page opposition in under five hours, and the speed itself became the evidence: the filing was full of fictitious and misleading citations, and the court treated the turnaround as proof no verification happened. His defense made it worse. He said his enterprise-level AI did not hallucinate, blamed an inadvertently filed draft he never produced, and kept filing citation errors after the defense and a sanctions motion had flagged the problem.
What happened
Lindemann, a California lawyer appearing pro hac vice for the plaintiff in Aguilar v. The Crawford Group, filed oppositions containing cases cited for propositions they do not support, a fictitious Westlaw citation, nonexistent and altered quotations, and at least one nonexistent case. He first withdrew the filing with no explanation, then attributed it for months to a wrong draft, without ever producing the claimed correct one.
The rule and the sanction
Rule 11, which in the First Circuit does not require bad faith. The court found Lindemann was not fully candid and showed a pattern of neglecting to confirm accuracy. His firm must pay the defendants' reasonable fees and costs for the sanctions litigation, capped at $10,000, and his pro hac vice admission was revoked. Local counsel was not sanctioned but was reminded of the duty to supervise pro hac counsel.
How it could have been avoided
An enterprise or paid AI tier does not eliminate hallucinations; verify every citation, quotation, and proposition in a primary database. Once errors are flagged, stop, disclose the AI source candidly, produce a clean corrected filing, and audit everything else you have pending. Claiming a wrong draft you cannot produce converts carelessness into a candor problem.
Watch the episode
This case is covered in Episode 12: The Phantom Draft (watch on YouTube).