Henry County Schools v. Grant (party-drafted order)

What happened

Three consolidated interlocutory appeals came to the Georgia Court of Appeals from an order denying motions to dismiss. The order under review had been drafted by plaintiffs' counsel and adopted by the trial court. The appellate court found that it ignored binding Georgia precedent, misquoted the cases it cited, and relied on at least one hallucinated case. No tool is named in the opinion; the court drew the inference from the citations themselves.

The practice of adopting a party-drafted order is ordinary and lawful. What is new is what a party-drafted order can now contain.

What the court did

The court reversed the denial of the motions to dismiss as to the state-law claims, and vacated the order as to the Title VII claims, remanding "for reconsideration under the proper standards and bona fide case law."

On the artificial intelligence point it wrote: "We find it troubling that counsel submitted such an order to the trial court, and regrettable that the trial court failed to identify any of these errors... Accordingly, we must, yet again, remind counsel, and lower courts, of their professional responsibilities and obligations in the use of artificial intelligence." It imposed no sanction. It cited Payne v. State and Slay v. Ross.

Where it stands

The case was remanded with direction on June 10, 2026. Proceedings on remand were not located as of September 17, 2026.

The obligation it engaged

The mechanism here is the one an expert should study most closely, because it is the mechanism by which unverified material acquires authority. Counsel drafted. The court signed. From that moment the fabricated case was in a court order, and it took an appeal to get it out.

The conduct engaged Clause 4 of the Standard, checkability before adoption. The clause is written for the moment of adoption, and adoption is exactly what the trial court did. It also engaged Clause 2, non-delegation, from the receiving end: a judge who signs a submitted order is exercising judicial judgment, and the errors survived because nobody between the draft and the signature performed the check.

The same structure appears wherever an expert's material moves upward. A figure that goes from an expert's appendix into counsel's brief, and from the brief into a court's findings, is checked at the point it is created or it is not checked at all. Everyone downstream is relying on the expert. That reliance is what Clause 3, independent authority, is meant to make safe.

Sources

• Court of Appeals of Georgia · June 10, 2026
  Henry County Schools v. Grant; v. Douglas; v. Forbes
• Damien Charlotin · September 17, 2026
  AI Hallucination Cases database

What could not be confirmed

The opinion does not name an artificial intelligence product; the inference is the court's, drawn from the citations. The drafting attorney is not named in the portion of the opinion obtained. Proceedings on remand were not located.