State Farm filed seven fake cases

You have read this story before, with the sides reversed.

For two years the lawyer with the fake cases has been a solo or a small plaintiff firm. This time they came out of the law firm defending State Farm. And the lawyer who caught them was sitting at the plaintiff's table.

His name is Eric Khodadian. He represents a mail carrier whose house burned and never got rebuilt. This summer State Farm's counsel filed a stack of motions in limine in California.

Khodadian read every one of them and pulled every case they cited.

Every hallucination story I have written has been about the lawyer who filed the brief. This one is about the lawyer who read it.

Seven cases, nine quotes and 13 holdings. None of them existed.

Khodadian caught State Farm's lawyers cold. He laid it out at an August 7 conference in Los Angeles Superior Court: cases that do not exist, quotes that do not exist, holdings that do not exist, running through nearly every motion in limine State Farm had filed. His final count: seven fabricated cases, nine fabricated quotes and 13 fabricated holdings, spread across eight filings.

The associate who drafted them, at Musick, Peeler & Garrett, told the court she used an AI research tool called Irys, which she believed was tied to the firm's Westlaw subscription and ran its own cite check. It did neither. Her lead trial counsel said he had not known AI was used and took responsibility for the filings.

The cite check Irys never ran has a name. It is called practicing law, and a plaintiff lawyer just enforced it on an insurance company's defense team.

On September 11, Judge Elizabeth Bradley fined the associate $999.99, one cent under the amount that would have required a notice to the State Bar. State Farm said it expects outside counsel to confirm the accuracy of everything filed on its behalf. Khodadian's client, who has been through a bankruptcy and a foreclosure since the fire, gets her trial October 5.

Read every cite the defense files. All of them.

Khodadian treated the other side's brief as a research assignment instead of a nuisance. Nothing about that requires software, a budget or a big firm.

A motion in limine is exactly where a fabricated case does the most damage to the side that filed it. You are standing in front of the judge who will run your trial, two months out, and the other side has just handed you proof that they did not read their own paper. Credibility does not recover from that before opening statements.

The instinct is the same one Meredith Hinton used when she found the lie in a witness's deposition transcript over a lunch break and turned a six-week trial into a $101 million verdict. Read the record. Read what they hand you. Check it against the source.

The rules are catching up. California has passed SB 574, the Court A.I. Protection Act, which would require lawyers to verify AI-generated work and disclose its use in filings. It is on the governor's desk.

None of that replaces the lawyer who reads. Every defense brief that lands on your desk this fall deserves the Khodadian treatment: pull every case, read every quote in the opinion it came from, confirm the holding says what they say it says. Someone is going to read those cites. Make sure it's you.

One more thing

It is almost October and the ocean here in San Diego is still warm enough for trunks. So I have been surfing more than usual, which means more time in beach parking lots. Which is where you meet all the kooks.

A kook, for the non-surfers, is a beginner who does not know he is one, and it shows in everything but the surfing. The gear is wrong, the etiquette is wrong, and he is having a better day than you are.

You can spot a kook before he touches the water. You spot him on the freeway.

The board is the tell. It is standing up through the sunroof of a rental sedan like a periscope. It is riding shotgun in a convertible, fin box working its way into the leather. It is bungeed to a roof rack with two cords and a prayer while every truck behind it changes lanes. My favorite this month was a leash, still attached, whipping at 70 like a wedding streamer.

Kook of the Day keeps a short list of commandments:

• Costco is not a surf shop.

• The only two non-surf buildings a board may enter are your house and an airport, which rules out the supermarket and the Apple Store.

• The wetsuit comes off at the car.
• Nobody has ever improved a Bloody Mary by drinking it in four millimeters of rubber, and once the socks go on, the pants go on too.

The last commandment is the catch. We are all kooks sooner or later, and the guy yelling at one is the bigger kook.

Now my confession. My first board was a foamy Wavestorm from the Costco in Mountain View, California. The same Costco where I bumped into Mark Zuckerberg browsing LCD TVs. I bring him up because he has since produced the most decorated kook moment of the century: the 2020 photo off Hawaii of him on a $12,000 electric hydrofoil, in a hoodie, holding the remote, face caked in white zinc from hairline to chin.

He later explained that he had spotted a paparazzo and figured a little extra sunscreen would make him unrecognizable. It did not. He now owns a custom board with a cartoon of the moment painted on the deck, which is either growth or the opposite.

Costco is not a surf shop. I know. I was there.

Send me your kook sightings. Blur the faces if you must.

~ Adam P.S. If you have caught a fabricated citation in a defense filing, reply and tell me what happened when you raised it.

Quote of the week

"Cases that do not exist, quotes that do not exist, and holdings that do not exist."

— Eric Khodadian, in a court filing describing what he found in State Farm's motions in limine, as reported by CalMatters.