Why This Blog Exists — and What Orthodoxy Does About It

Something is happening in courtrooms across the country, and it is worth tracking carefully.

In the past three years, hundreds of court proceedings have addressed attorneys who submitted AI-generated content without verifying it first. Fabricated case citations. Invented quotations from real opinions. In one recent matter, a federal court documented fabricated text from a federal regulation — not a case, a regulation — submitted across five separate filings in the same case. Courts are responding with sanctions, dismissals, bar referrals, and increasingly pointed language about what competent legal practice now requires.

This blog is a record of that pattern, and the prescription of the solution.

What you will find here

Every post on this blog is anchored to a specific filing — a sanctions order, a show cause ruling, a disciplinary referral. We read the documents. We extract what the court actually found. We explain what it means for attorneys, law firm administrators, bar associations, and malpractice insurers. And we cite everything, because that is the standard we hold ourselves to.

We are not here to alarm you about AI. Courts have been careful on this point, repeatedly. In April 2026, the Supreme Court of Alabama noted that AI-assisted legal research "can sometimes be quite helpful to both practitioners and judges." Justice Cook of that same court went further, observing that at some point, failure to use AI as a tool may itself reflect a lack of competence. The Sixth Circuit said essentially the same thing while sanctioning two attorneys the same month. The problem courts are addressing is not the technology. It is what attorneys do (or fail to do) after the technology produces its output.

What is being sanctioned, in case after case, is the absence of verification. The absence of any contemporaneous documentation showing that an attorney read the cases, confirmed the citations, and signed off before filing. When courts ask what steps were taken, too many attorneys have no record to show, no process to demonstrate.

What Orthodoxy does

Orthodoxy was built to produce that record.

When an attorney uses Orthodoxy for AI-assisted legal research, every citation generated is logged at the passage level. A second independent AI call runs a contradiction check, flagging where citations conflict with each other or with the legal proposition being researched. The attorney reviews, corrects, and signs off — not with a single blanket certification, but citation by citation. When sign-off is complete, Orthodoxy generates an immutable compliance certificate with a SHA-256 cryptographic hash, timestamped and attorney-signed, that cannot be altered after the fact without detection. Auditors can verify the certificate's integrity independently through a dedicated verification route.

Orthodoxy does not verify citations for attorneys. It documents that attorneys did.

That distinction is not a disclaimer. It is the accurate description of what the product does, and it is the distinction that matters when a court or a disciplinary body asks what steps were actually taken. The attorneys who have been sanctioned in the cases we cover on this blog could not answer that question with evidence. Orthodoxy provides the evidence.

Who this blog is for

Attorneys using AI in their practice who want to understand what courts are now requiring. Law firm administrators who need to know what governance gaps look like when they produce malpractice exposure. Bar associations tracking the disciplinary patterns courts are documenting and thinking about what guidance should address. Malpractice insurers evaluating how documentation practices change the claims defense calculus.

Each post identifies its primary audience and explains what the filing means for that specific reader. Most cases are relevant across all four audiences. Some have a particularly sharp angle for one, but we hope to make that plain for you.

The cases are real. The pattern is documented. The record is the solution.

Every post on this blog is a primary source. We tell you what the court said, where it said it, and what it means. We do not speculate beyond what the filings support. And we will keep building the library as long as courts keep producing cases worth covering — which, at the current rate, will be for some time.