Avergil v. Yaakov

What happened

Avergil v. Yaakov is a negligence suit in the Nof HaGalil-Nazareth Magistrates' Court in Israel, file TA 38820-04-24. The plaintiff alleges that the second defendant, a lawyer acting as trustee, transferred estate funds of ILS 360,000 to the account of his former partner, the first defendant, instead of to his own. The lawyer-defendant filed a third-party notice against the first defendant and two banks, Mizrahi Tefahot Bank and Mercantile Discount Bank.

On March 10 the lawyer-defendant filed the opinion of a banking expert, Avi Bazura. The report reviewed banking regulation and the Payment Services Law, 5779-2019, and attached two appendices summarizing court decisions. Mercantile moved to strike the third-party notice or, in the alternative, the report, arguing that it rested on case law, legislation and literature invented by artificial intelligence. Mizrahi joined. The lawyer-defendant then moved to amend her notice on the strength of the report. She argued that any AI question belonged in cross-examination.

What the court did

Senior Judge Shaden Nashef-Abu Ahmad ran her own check of the sources. Her decision records four kinds of defect:

• A nonexistent Supreme Court precedent. An appendix built around a so-called Aharoni rule, attributed to Civil Appeal 136/14, Mercantile Discount Bank v. Aharoni, could not be located by number or by party names.
• A misattributed decision. The report attributed to the Supreme Court a ruling on appeal from district court file TA 1793/04. That file does not deal with the issue; the relevant ruling was a district court decision of December 31, 2007.
• A book passage that could not be found. The report quoted a book on commercial law by Professor Ricardo Ben-Oliel without page references. The court's independent search found no such book, article or quotation.
• Invented statutory text. The report's versions of sections 20, 25 and 27 of the Payment Services Law did not match the enacted text.

The court also held it against the lawyer-defendant that she filed only her own response and never the expert's answer to the specific allegations. Citing the Supreme Court's treatment of uncontrolled AI use by lawyers and, in Ben Cohen v. Ramat Gan Municipality, by a municipality dealing with a citizen, the judge wrote that the same approach applies, in this record's translation from the Hebrew, "also to other professionals in the legal proceeding, including an expert on behalf of a party who submits an opinion to the court." She held that such an opinion should not wait for the evidentiary stage, and that the fictitious sources "strip the opinion of any professional value" (again this record's translation). The report was struck under Regulations 41(a)(4) and 42 of the Civil Procedure Regulations, 5779-2018. The amendment motion was dismissed because it rested on the struck report, lacked a supporting affidavit and came about two years late.

Where it stands

The lawyer-defendant was ordered to pay costs of ILS 2,500 to each third party separately, within 30 days and regardless of the outcome. The order for the third parties' witness affidavits was renewed, and the third-party claim proceeds on its original notice without the Bazura report. No appeal or motion for leave to appeal was located as of October 21, 2026.

Avergil v. Yaakov joins other Israeli expert matters in this record, including Plonit v. Clal and the Biton matter. What distinguishes Avergil is timing: the court removed the report before any cross-examination, rejecting the argument that the defects went only to weight.

The obligation it engaged

Clause 3 of the Standard, independent authority, is the clause most directly engaged. The Avergil report characterized a precedent, a decision, a book and three statutory sections, and none of those characterizations survived comparison with the source. Clause 4, checkability before adoption, explains why the court could act at once: most citations were specific enough to test, and when tested they failed. Where the report gave no page reference for the book, it was not checkable at all, and the court placed that burden on the party and its expert.

Clause 2, non-delegation, bears on the court's description of the defects as the product of uncontrolled AI use, a characterization drawn from the pattern of errors rather than from any account by the expert. The lesson for an expert witness is concrete: an expert who quotes a statute should quote it from the official text and keep a copy, and an expert whose report is challenged should answer in his own name. In Avergil the expert's silence counted against the party that retained him.

Sources

• Nof HaGalil-Nazareth Magistrates' Court (copy hosted for the AI Hallucination Cases database) · October 8, 2026
  Decision in TA 38820-04-24 Avergil v. Yaakov (Hebrew)

What could not be confirmed

The decision is in Hebrew; every quotation in this entry is this record's own translation, and the transliteration of names (Avergil, Bazura, Ben-Oliel) is this record's. The decision orders costs to each third party; whether that includes the first defendant, against whom judgment had already been entered, is not stated. Ben Cohen v. Ramat Gan Municipality (Supreme Court, AAA 63194-08-25) was opened only to confirm its subject. No appeal was located as of 2026-10-21.