Case D-35 · AI Sanctions Case Tracker

Butler Snow matter (Alabama prison litigation)

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, sanctions order July 23, 2025 (Judge Anna M. Manasco)

Episode 17

The case

The signature case. Three Butler Snow lawyers were removed from Alabama's prison litigation not because one of them used ChatGPT, but because all three signed or supervised filings none of them had verified. The order's remedy is as notable as the reprimands: each lawyer had to send the sanctions order to his clients, to opposing counsel, to every judge before whom he had a pending case, and to every attorney at the firm. The sanction was designed to be read.

What happened

Matthew Reeves used ChatGPT to find legal authorities and filed them without verification. William Cranford and William Lunsford signed or supervised the filings without independent review. Five fabricated citations appeared across two filings in the prison-conditions litigation.

The rule and the sanction

All three lawyers were publicly reprimanded, disqualified and removed from the case, and referred to the Alabama State Bar, with the dissemination order described above. No monetary sanctions were imposed. Reciprocal discipline followed: Oklahoma publicly reprimanded Reeves in 2026, holding that knowingly using AI to generate citations without verification is a knowing false statement under its candor rule, and Texas, Tennessee, and Alabama imposed their own public discipline for the same conduct.

How it could have been avoided

Supervisors and signers are independently liable; signing a filing you did not verify is its own violation, not a lesser one. And when one fabrication is found, audit every other filing in the case before the court does. Here the five fake citations spanned two filings, which is what made it a pattern.

Watch the episode

This case is covered in Episode 17: 3 Lawyers Sanctioned for 5 Fake AI Citations (Ep 17) (watch on YouTube).