Minnesota lawyer suspended over fake AI case citations
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The city of Biwabik is known for its Bavarian-themed downtown, mountain bike trails, and as the gateway to Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. But the St. Louis County community of 966 people was never a defendant in a 1948 lawsuit filed by a plaintiff named Anderson.
That did not stop Minnesota attorney Faisal S. Ahmed from citing Anderson v. City of Biwabik in a 2025 legal memorandum that he filed in Hennepin County Court. Ahmed also cited Doherty v. Alma E. Clark Memorial Home, another nonexistent case, in an effort to convince Judge Lois Conroy to rule in his client’s favor in a civil suit.
Both cases were invented from whole cloth from an AI tool that Ahmed used in drafting the brief.
Ahmed, who was first licensed to practice law in Minnesota in 2014, had represented the owner of a Robbinsdale food store who’d been sued by his landlord after falling behind on rent payments.
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The fake case citations first came to light in an Aug. 21, 2025 hearing when the property owner’s attorney, George Warner, Jr., told Conroy that Ahmed’s filing likely contained AI hallucinations. Ahmed missed a deadline to provide a written response to the allegations, but Warner outlined the errors in a detailed letter to the judge several weeks later.
In addition to the fake cases, Ahmed included a false quotation from a real case, as well as two citation errors. MPR News sought comment from Ahmed Friday afternoon via email and voicemail messages.
“AI, like the advent of word processors and the Internet, can be a powerful tool to aid attorneys in their legal work,” Conroy writes in a January order. “But these technological improvements should not be accepted with blind, unyielding faith or used as a substitute for legal analysis and interpretation.”
“The problem has become so common that a website has been set up to catalogue the over 800 documented instances of litigants (and now judges) using AI to cite fake law and hallucinate quotes,” Conroy added.
Conroy ruled in favor of the property owner and ordered the defendants to pay $233,563 in back rent. She later fined Ahmed $5,000 and referred him to the Minnesota Lawyer’s Professional Responsibility Board.
Ahmed’s “conduct in submitting false cases to the court caused unnecessary delay and burdened opposing counsel and the court, who had to take extra time to find cases that did not exist or that were incorrectly cited and address the case hallucination issues,” write Binh Tuong and Deanna Natoli with the state’s Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility in a petition for disciplinary action filed Friday with the Minnesota Supreme Court.
According to the filing, Ahmed agreed to a 30-day suspension of his law license and to pay an additional $900 in costs.
Tuong and Natoli note that this is not the first time in which attorneys have faced judicial opprobrium for submitting filings with fake AI citations. In 2024 the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to review a petition in a personal injury case after a lawyer included fictitious legal citations generated by ChatGPT.
“We take this opportunity to remind members of the bar of the State of Minnesota that their ethical obligations, including the obligation to provide competent legal representation and candor toward the tribunal, apply to any use of artificial intelligence tools,” writes Chief Justice Natalie Hudson in the 2024 case.
In a St. Paul federal courtroom several months later, U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino tossed out the testimony of Stanford misinformation researcher Jeff Hancock, who was retained by the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office to defend a state law prohibiting election deepfakes, after Hancock submitted written testimony that included non-existent academic paper citations generated by ChatGPT.
