Landgericht Darmstadt expert fee decision

What happened

In German civil procedure the court appoints the expert. The Sachverstandiger is the tribunal's neutral, not a party's retained witness, and is paid out of the proceeding under a statutory fee schedule. That difference matters for what follows, because the sanction available here has no direct counterpart in United States practice.

A court-appointed medical expert submitted a report in proceedings numbered 19 O 527/16 and claimed a fee of 2,374.50 euros. The court concluded the report had been produced by an AI system. The features it identified were textual: repeated identical wording, sentences composed almost entirely of main clauses with identical openings, formatting errors, and phrasing that suggested iteration through prompts rather than composition. The claimant had never been physically examined.

What the court did

The court set the expert's remuneration at zero euros, against the 2,374.50 euros claimed, under section 8a(2) sentence 1 number 1 of the Justizvergutungs- und -entschadigungsgesetz, the statute governing compensation of court-appointed experts. The stated basis is that a report is compensable only insofar as it is usable.

No fabricated citation was at issue. The report was not struck for containing a nonexistent authority, as in Kohls v. Ellison, nor excluded under a reliability standard, as in In re Celsius Network. The objection was that the document was not the expert's work and that the examination it purported to rest on had not taken place. The remedy followed from that: work that is not the expert's own is not work the court pays for.

Measured by consequence to the individual, this is the hardest outcome in the record. Exclusion costs an expert an engagement. A fee reduced to nothing costs the engagement and the compensation together, and does so through an ordinary fee-setting mechanism rather than a sanction.

Where it stands

The decision is dated November 10, 2025. No appellate treatment was located as of September 28, 2026.

It is the clearest foreign counterpart to the reproducibility problem that Matter of Weber reached in a New York Surrogate's Court, where a damages expert could not recall the prompt he used and the court ran the system itself and received three different figures. Both courts arrived at the same place by different routes: an analysis nobody can retrace is not an analysis the tribunal can rely on.

The obligation it engaged

Clause 2, non-delegation, is the whole of it. The opinion, the basis for it, and the decision to render it are the expert's alone, and the court here concluded they were not.

Clause 5, reproducible analysis, is engaged by the absent examination. A report resting on an examination that did not occur cannot be reproduced by anyone, because there is nothing to reproduce it from. Clause 7, contemporaneous record, is engaged by what the court had to do instead: with no record of how the document was produced, it reasoned from the shape of the prose. An expert with a contemporaneous record would have been arguing about that record rather than about sentence structure.

Sources

• Legal Tribune Online · November 2025
  LG Darmstadt zu Sachverstaendigen: Gutachten mit KI erstellt
• Hallucination Cases Database (Damien Charlotin) · September 28, 2026
  Landgericht Darmstadt, 19 O 527/16

What could not be confirmed

The primary text at the Hessenrecht portal could not be retrieved by the method used here, so the decision was not read. The case number, date, the 2,374.50 euro figure, the zero-euro result, the section 8a JVEG basis, the reasoning from AI-typical text patterns and the court-appointment status all come from German legal press rather than from the decision. Which system was used, and which parts of the report were machine-produced, are not stated in that coverage. The decision should be read before any of it is quoted.