A Florida appellate court just moved the line on AI in legal filings. Every lawyer using AI needs to understand where it moved to.

For two years the profession has been operating on a rule of thumb that felt like enough. Use AI if you want, but check your citations. Every sanctions opinion that made the rounds involved fabricated cases — the lawyer who cited authority that did not exist, the brief full of hallucinated quotes. The lesson everyone took was simple. Verify the cites and you are safe.

Today the Fourth District Court of Appeal took that rule of thumb apart.

In Lisandrillo v. Palozzi, No. 4D2026-2262 (Fla. 4th DCA Sept. 16, 2026), the court denied a writ petition in a Broward dissolution case and wrote separately, in its own words, “solely to address counsel’s filing of what appears to be ‘AI slop.’” Then it put the entire point in footnote one.

“The AI slop problem we address here has nothing to do with hallucinated law or false legal citations. The citations are real. The cases exist. The language is confident. Yet the analytical reasoning—or lack of it—reveals that the arguments were assembled by an AI tool rather than developed through a trained advocate’s independent judgment.”

Lisandrillo v. Palozzi, No. 4D2026-2262, at 1 n.1

Read that again. The citations were real. The cases existed. And the court still issued an order to show cause why petitioner’s counsel should not be referred to the Florida Bar for disciplinary proceedings.

Citation accuracy is now the floor. It is not the defense.

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What the court was actually looking at

The underlying case is an ordinary Broward dissolution with a ten-year-old child, an agreed stay-away order, reunification therapy, and a court-appointed guardian ad litem. Counsel appeared for the petitioner in May 2026. What the court describes after that is a filing record, not a litigation strategy.

• A 41-page “Urgent Omnibus Application” demanding thirteen forms of relief.
• An 11-page emergency motion demanding nine more, filed the same night the court appointed counsel for the GAL.
• Three separate motions in limine, filed the day before the hearing.
• A 33-page motion to disqualify the judge, raising fourteen grounds.
• A 61-page emergency writ petition seeking review of eight separate rulings, twenty-five pages of which argued that certiorari should issue as to seven of them.

Meanwhile the client testified and admitted violating the agreed order. She was held in contempt, hit with fees and costs as a compensatory sanction, and made responsible for half the GAL fees going forward.

That is the part worth sitting with. All that volume, and the client lost on the facts she had already conceded.

The eight things that gave it away

The court did not announce a test. But it organized its analysis under headings that work like one, and that list is the most useful thing any Florida lawyer can take from this opinion. These are the markers a Florida appellate court now reads as evidence that a document was assembled rather than written.

One. An emergency that was not one. Under the Fourth District’s administrative order, a true emergency means action is needed within hours, not days or weeks. The claimed harms here were accruing GAL fees and a compliance deadline that had already passed. The court called the filing what it was — an attempt to get priority over other litigants, which “is an abuse of procedure.”

Two. Eight proceedings crammed into one. A prohibition petition challenging a disqualification denial does not double as a certiorari vehicle for everything else that went badly.

Three. A citation to an unpublished order. Counsel cited the court’s own unpublished decision in an unrelated case from three years earlier, solely to disparage the trial judge. Unpublished decisions carry no precedential value and should not be cited for anything but res judicata. That has been settled since 1983.

Four. A hallucinated legal premise the court now sees constantly. The argument that filing a Rule 2.330 motion to disqualify automatically stays all proceedings below. It does not. The court noted it has seen that exact AI-generated argument “all too often.”

Five. Allegations the record refuted. The motion claimed the judge “systematically muzzled” counsel. The transcript said otherwise. And the court delivered the sentence that is going to be quoted in Florida CLEs for the next decade: “A judge cannot be disqualified based on AI-hallucinated events.”

Six. Prose the court could not parse. It reproduced a passage verbatim, called it legal gibberish, and noted that the filings bold and italicize seemingly random sentences, “causing the reader to focus on what turns out to be irrelevant facts.”

Seven. An argument built out of transcription errors. This is the one that should make every litigator uncomfortable. Counsel argued at length that the judge had repeatedly mispronounced and misgendered her name — all of it drawn from an unofficial rough draft transcript. The official transcript reflected none of it. No citations were given. Counsel never objected at the hearing. The court’s conclusion: “We suspect that AI generated these bogus arguments from mistranscriptions in the ‘rough draft transcript.’”

An AI read a flawed transcript, found a pattern in the errors, and manufactured a bias argument out of typos. Nobody checked.

Eight. Issue churning. The court named this one directly. “Many AI-generated or AI-assisted documents aggressively raise scattershot arguments. This tactic does nothing to further the interests of the client and instead hurts the chances of success.”

Authorship stopped mattering

The most important sentence in the opinion is the one that closes the door on the defense everyone was planning to use.

“Ultimately, however, whether this was AI-generated, AI-assisted, or something else makes no difference. An attorney is obligated to stand behind any submission to a court.”

The hook is Rule 2.515(d)(2). Your signature represents that you read the document, that there are good grounds to support it, and that it is not interposed for delay. The court did not need to prove a machine wrote the filing. It only needed the signature.

From there it named six Rules of Professional Conduct: competence, adviser, meritorious claims and contentions, expediting litigation, candor toward the tribunal, and fees.

The billing problem nobody is talking about yet

That last one is the sleeper, and it has not gotten the attention it deserves.

The court raised Rule 4-1.5 on its own and went to the first reasonable-fee factor — the time and labor required, the complexity of the questions involved, and the skill requisite to perform the service properly. Then it wrote this.

“It takes almost no skill and little time to generate AI slop. When a lawyer files such slop, the lawyer violates the duty to ‘exercise independent professional judgment.’”

A Florida appellate court has now tied AI-generated volume directly to fee reasonableness. If you bill hourly and your work product carries these markers, opposing counsel has an appellate opinion to attach to a fee objection. That exposure exists whether or not anyone ever files a Bar complaint.

Where this is heading

This is the Fourth District’s third AI-abuse decision in under four months. Avery v. Beauzil came down May 27, 2026. Gouldy v. Chiasson followed on July 22, 2026. Both involved pro se litigants. This one does not, and the court said why in plain terms: “Courts must require more from attorneys and not tolerate abusive practice fueled by AI.”

The Second District is on the same path. In August it wrote that “it defies belief for a practicing attorney to plead ignorance of the risks of relying on generative AI without double-checking the results.” Capital Standard, LLC v. U.S. Bank, 2026 WL 2450571 (Fla. 2d DCA Aug. 21, 2026).

The escalation is not subtle. Pro se litigants in May and July. A licensed attorney and a Bar referral in September.

What we would actually tell you to do

Read the opinion. All eighteen pages, including the appendix, where the court reproduces a thirteen-part wherefore clause so the reader can see for themselves what churning looks like.

Then be honest about your own last filing. Not about the citations — about the judgment. How many grounds did it raise, and could you defend each one standing up? Did you file it as an emergency because it was one, or because you wanted it heard sooner? Did you argue from the official transcript or from a rough draft? Would a judge reading it cold understand what you want and why you are entitled to it?

That is the actual test the Fourth DCA applied, and it has nothing to do with what software was open when the document was drafted.

Here is the part we will not soften, even though it cuts against the business we are in. This opinion is not a case for using AI in a law practice. It is proof that the tool never absorbs the lawyer’s judgment, and that a court can see the difference from the bench. Any vendor telling you their product makes this problem go away is selling you the exact posture that got counsel in Lisandrillo an order to show cause.

What a well-built system does is narrower and more honest. It constrains the output to real authority in your jurisdiction. It structures the work the way the rule and the court actually require. It puts the decisions back in front of you instead of burying them under forty pages. And it makes the reasoning visible enough that you can stand behind your own signature, which is the only thing the Fourth DCA cared about.

The lawyer is still the lawyer. That is not a limitation of the technology. As of today, in the Fourth District, it is the rule.

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Citation

Lisandrillo v. Palozzi, No. 4D2026-2262 (Fla. 4th DCA Sept. 16, 2026) (Gross, J.; Levine and Shepherd, JJ., concurring). Petition for writ of prohibition denied; order to show cause concerning sanctions issued. Petition for writ of prohibition to the Circuit Court for the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit, Broward County. Not final until disposition of a timely-filed motion for rehearing.

Verification notice. Every citation and quotation in this article is taken from the opinion as issued. Independent attorney verification against the published opinion is required before relying on any of it. The opinion is not final and its holdings may change on rehearing. This article is commentary, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Prepared with AI assistance and reviewed by a licensed Florida attorney.

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