Falkenstein v. Niles

The record

• CourtUnited States District Court, Central District of California
• JudgeStanley Blumenfeld, Jr., United States District Judge
• Order“Order Regarding Defendants’ Use of Artificial Intelligence”, Document 43, Page ID #857 to #859
• Dated3 September 2026
• CounselAshley D. Posner, for the defence
• PenaltyNone. The order is pre-sanction
• Status“The Court has not determined that counsel violated Rule 11, the Court’s Standing Order, or any other obligation. The Court raises these issues so that counsel may provide an explanation at the hearing”

The three certifications

The order quotes them. With the motion to dismiss, counsel “declared under penalty of perjury that ‘no portion’ of the memorandum was ‘drafted or generated using generative artificial intelligence’ and that all legal analysis, factual recitation, and citations were personally prepared by her”.

With the reply, counsel disclosed using generative AI to assist in “sorting evidence, identifying relevant legal arguments, and drafting portions” of the filing, and certified that she personally reviewed every AI-assisted portion and “verified the accuracy and existence of all legal authorities”, including that propositions of law were correctly attributed to the cited sources. A materially similar disclosure and certification accompanied the preliminary-injunction opposition.

The six defects the court identified

• 1A quotation attributed to Committee for Idaho’s High Desert, Inc. v. Yost, 92 F.3d 814, 823 (9th Cir. 1996) that does not appear in it
• 2A successor-in-interest proposition attributed to Cumulus Media, Inc. v. Clear Channel Communications, Inc., 304 F.3d 1167, 1175-76 (11th Cir. 2002) that the court could not locate in the decision
• 3Allegations attributed to paragraph 21 of the complaint that are not in it, including the word “engaged” placed in quotation marks although it does not appear there
• 4Reliance on the absence of partnership documents while citing Barr v. United Methodist Church, 90 Cal. App. 3d 259, 266-67 (1979), which states that “[f]ormalities of quasi-corporate organization are not required”
• 5A quotation attributed to Herb Reed Enterprises, Inc. v. Monroe Powell’s Platters, Inc., 736 F.3d 1245, 1252 (9th Cir. 2013), where the quoted language does not appear in the actual decision, Herb Reed Enterprises, LLC v. Florida Entertainment Management, Inc., 736 F.3d 1239 (9th Cir. 2013)
• 6A quotation attributed to Oakland Tribune, Inc. v. Chronicle Publishing Co., 762 F.2d 1374, 1377 (9th Cir. 1985) that does not appear in it

What the order actually decides, and what it does not

It decides nothing yet. That is the point of reading it carefully. The court has not found a breach of Rule 11 or of its own standing order, and it says so in terms. It has listed what it could not reconcile and set a hearing.

The court did not say the certification counted for nothing. A certification is evidence of what the signer states. What this order shows is that the court declined to treat it as conclusive: having found the defects, it went behind the certificate and asked for the steps that stand behind it. The distinction matters, and overstating it would misdescribe the order.

The fifth question in the order is the one that travels:

“which portions of the reply and preliminary-injunction opposition were prepared with the assistance of AI and what steps counsel took to verify them”

An attorney who kept a record of the verification can answer it in a sentence and attach the record. An attorney who did not keep one has to reconstruct, from memory, work done weeks earlier, in front of a judge who has already read the filings more closely than they did.

Sources

• Falkenstein v. Niles, Order Regarding Defendants’ Use of Artificial Intelligence, 3 September 2026, three pages, the copy read in full for this page
• United States District Court, Central District of California, where the docket is published

Related

• Every verified AI standing order
• SRA v Kumar, the same two questions put by a regulator, with a name removed from a register at the end of them
• California SB 574, pending, which would put personal verification of every citation into the sanctions statute
• Verification is becoming a duty. Evidence of verification is the missing layer.

Verified 11 September 2026 against the order, read in full. Information, not legal advice.