Before You Sign - A Cautionary Tale for Judges
A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court of Georgia vacated an order denying Hannah Payne’s motion for a new trial. Payne is serving a life sentence for murder. The order, issued by a trial judge, contained citations to cases that did not exist. The prosecutor who prepared the order admitted she had used AI to draft it and had not verified the citations.
The Supreme Court suspended her from practicing before it for six months, vacated the order and sent the case back with instructions that a new order be prepared, but not by counsel for either party. The Supreme Court further urged trial court judges across the state to review proposed orders with the understanding that AI may have been used. That last instruction is the one judges everywhere need to read.
The order in Payne v. State was not unusual in its structure. A judge ruled, a lawyer drafted the order, and the judge signed it. That is how proposed orders work in busy courts everywhere, every day. What was unusual is that the law cited in the order did not exist.
And Payne is not the first time this has happened. Last year, in Shahid v. Esaam, a Georgia divorce case, a trial court signed an order drafted by counsel that relied on two fake cases. The Georgia Court of Appeals later vacated it. A few months later, in In re Domestic Partnership of Torres Campos and Munoz, a California appellate court confronted the same problem in a pet custody dispute after a trial court signed a proposed order citing fictional family law decisions.
This new pattern should stop every judge in their tracks.
Judges have always known that proposed orders require review. A lawyer drafts it, the court reads it, edits it if necessary, and signs it only if it accurately reflects the ruling. But in a busy court, that process can begin to feel almost perfunctory. The hearing is over, the decision has been made, and the order arrives later to put the ruling into final form. What feels like routine signature work is still judicial work, and AI has changed the risk in that routine.
A proposed order can now look polished, cited, formatted, and legally serious while containing law that does not exist. That is why this line of cases matters so much. It should be a wake up call for all of us.
When a lawyer files a brief with fake cases, the lawyer has created a serious problem. But when a judge signs an order with fake cases, the problem becomes something more. The error becomes the court’s voice and carries the authority of the court. And neither the parties nor the public will meaningfully separate the lawyer’s draft from the judge’s signature.
That does not mean judges need to distrust every lawyer or turn every proposed order into a research project. It does mean though that we can no longer assume that citations in a proposed order have been meaningfully checked simply because they came from counsel. If an order contains legal authority, verify it. If it quotes a case, check the quote. If a proposition is central to the ruling, make sure the authority actually supports it.
The court’s signature is not a courtesy or a rubber stamp. It is the moment the document becomes the law. The order is the court’s voice, and in the AI era, judges have to protect it with more care than ever.
