Disclosure: DROZlegal builds a verified-citation CanLII research corpus, mentioned below as one of several ways to reduce citation-fabrication risk. This checklist itself is general professional-practice guidance that applies regardless of which AI tool — or none — touched the document. This is general information, not legal advice, and reflects Ontario law as of September 3, 2026.
Why this is a per-filing checklist, not a firm policy
Our firm-level AI readiness checklist asks whether your firm should be using AI at all — data maturity, staff buy-in, compliance posture, budget. That's a once-in-a-while question.
This one is narrower and repeats every time: has anyone actually verified what's in this document, before it goes to court? A firm that scores well on the readiness checklist can still file a hallucinated factum if nobody runs this list on the specific filing going out today — which is exactly what happened in both cases below.
The four-check citation-verification list
Work through all four groups, in order, for every citation an AI tool touched — no matter how confident or well-formatted the draft looks. A citation that fails any single check does not go in the filing until it's fixed.
1–3. Before you draft: source discipline
| # | Check | Why it matters | If you skip it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Confirm which AI tool touched this document, and what it was allowed to see. | Ontario Regulation 275/26's certification duty (items 8–9 below) attaches to the human signer, not the tool — you need to know what actually generated each passage before you can verify it. | A signer who can't say what generated a passage can't meaningfully certify what's in it. |
| 2 | Keep the AI's suggested authorities in a separate working list from your own shortlist until each one clears verification. | Mixing unverified AI output directly into a live draft is how a fabricated case ends up indistinguishable from a real one by the time anyone proofreads. | An unverified citation reads exactly like a verified one on the page. |
| 3 | Treat a fluent, correctly formatted citation as no evidence of accuracy on its own. | Mazaheri's tribunal filings hyperlinked what looked like a real citation — "Law Society of Ontario v. Mercer" — that actually resolved to an unrelated case. | Confidence and correct formatting are exactly what a fabricated citation looks like, right up until someone clicks through. |
4–7. Verify every citation: existence, quotation, support, currency
| # | Check | Why it matters | If you skip it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | Existence. Open the actual decision on CanLII, e-Laws, or the official report — not a search-engine snippet or the AI tool's own summary. | A citation nobody can independently locate is not a citation. | The Law Society built a 15-page chart of citations that simply didn't exist to confront Mazaheri with at a case management conference. |
| 5 | Quotation. Does every quoted passage match the source's actual wording, word for word? | This is now a literal certification for factums and expert reports, not just a best practice — see items 8–9. | A misquoted authority is exactly what Ontario's new factum/expert-report certification duty asks the signer to rule out. |
| 6 | Support. Does the cited authority actually stand for the proposition attached to it? | A real, correctly quoted case can still be cited for a proposition it doesn't support. | Mazaheri cited paragraph 29 of a real 2015 tribunal decision for a proposition that paragraph does not support. |
| 7 | Currency. Has the case been overturned, distinguished, or otherwise stopped being good law? | An AI tool trained on a fixed snapshot has no way to know what happened to a case after its training cutoff. | A technically real, on-point citation can still mislead the court if it's no longer good law. |
8–10. Before you sign: the certification duty
| # | Check | Why it matters | If you skip it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | Know whether Rule 4.06.1 (factum) or Rule 53.03/Form 53 (expert report) certification applies to this specific document. | Since September 1, 2026, Ontario Regulation 275/26 requires the person signing to certify they are satisfied any quoted passage accurately reflects its source — the mechanics are covered in full in our O. Reg. 275/26 explainer, not repeated here. | An unmet certification is a procedural defect on the record, not only a professional-conduct risk. |
| 9 | Confirm the actual signer personally ran, or personally reviewed a record of, checks 4–7 — not a junior, an assistant, or a tool. | The Law Society Tribunal found that when confronted over her factum's fabricated cases, Toronto lawyer Mary Hyun-Sook Lee falsely blamed a staff member she had not employed in years. | Delegating verification to someone who doesn't exist, or didn't actually do it, is the exact pattern the tribunal penalized. |
| 10 | Keep a dated verification record in the file — printed case pages, a citation log, or dated notes — not just a memory of having checked. | If a filing is later questioned, "I checked it" without a record is a much weaker answer than a dated log. | No record means no way to show the verification step actually happened. |
11–12. Before you file: the final gate
| # | Check | Why it matters | If you skip it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | A named lawyer signs off on the finished document — never the AI tool, and never an unsupervised junior. | Court filing is one of DROZlegal's own six permanent hard ceilings, for a reason that has nothing to do with any one vendor: no software files on a lawyer's behalf, and no tool's confidence substitutes for a human sign-off. | A filing without a clearly accountable human signer is a filing nobody actually verified. |
| 12 | If anything on this list is still open, the filing waits. | A looming deadline is not a reason to skip checks 4–7 — it's usually the reason firms skip them. | Both cases below involved lawyers who filed anyway rather than pausing to finish verification. |
What this checklist would have caught
| Case | What went wrong | Checklist item that catches it |
|---|---|---|
| Mazaheri v. Law Society of Ontario, 2026 ONLSTH 112 — $31,150 in costs | A hyperlinked citation resolved to a different, unrelated case; a real 2015 tribunal decision was cited for a proposition its own paragraph 29 doesn't support. | Item 4 (existence) and item 6 (support) |
| Lee, Law Society Tribunal, July 16, 2026 — six-month suspension + $10,000 in costs | A factum built on non-existent ChatGPT-generated case law; a false claim that unemployed staff had prepared it when confronted. | Item 4 (existence) and item 9 (personal, verifiable sign-off) |
Both are Ontario disciplinary decisions, not hypotheticals, and both are part of a fast-growing pattern: Damien Charlotin's independently maintained AI Hallucination Cases Database, a public tracker of AI-fabricated-citation incidents in court filings worldwide, had logged 1,668 confirmed cases as of July 2, 2026 — up from 1,598 less than a month earlier. For the full story behind the Mazaheri decision, including the case-management chart the Law Society used to catch it, see our explainer on Ontario's AI-fabricated-citations ruling.
Where a verified-citation research tool helps — and where it doesn't
Item 4 is where AI research tools built on a verified-citation architecture earn their keep. DROZlegal's own research module, for example, runs on a CanLII-ingested case-law corpus with touch-driven auto-ingest, grounding a case-law answer in a real, retrievable record rather than an open-ended model answering from memory. Commercial legal-AI tools with their own citation-checking features, and a disciplined habit of pulling every case on CanLII or e-Laws by hand, do the same underlying job.
None of that reaches items 5, 6, 9, or 11. A verified-citation corpus can help confirm a case exists; it doesn't confirm a quoted passage matches word for word, that the case supports the proposition attached to it, or that a real, accountable person actually looked. That's exactly why Ontario Regulation 275/26 put the certification on the signer, not on any tool — the same reason court filing itself stays off any automation path at DROZlegal, permanently.
Print this before your next AI-assisted filing
The mechanics of Ontario Regulation 275/26 itself — which forms changed, and how a citation linker can sit around the certification duty without replacing it — are covered in the motion and factum guide linked in item 8 above. And if the deeper question is whether your firm is ready for AI at all, not just this one filing, start with the firm-level readiness checklist linked at the top of this piece.