The Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal has denied a writ petition it describes as apparent AI slop and ordered the petitioner's attorney to show cause, without using AI, why sanctions such as a Florida Bar referral should not be imposed

What the court decided, and what it only threatened

Two things were decided and one was set in motion. The petition for a writ of prohibition, which sought review of the trial judge's refusal to disqualify herself, is denied. The petition's separate request for certiorari review of seven other rulings is also denied; the court says on page 14 that none of those rulings is appealable or subject to certiorari and that oral rulings are not reviewable by certiorari at all. The disposition line on page 15 reads: "Petition denied. Order to show cause concerning sanctions issued."

The third thing is the order to show cause. Within ten days of the opinion, the petitioner's attorney, Jaclyn R. Soroka, is directed to file a response and show cause, in the court's words, "without the use of AI", why sanctions "such as referral to the Florida Bar for consideration of disciplinary proceedings" should not be imposed for submitting frivolous filings. The court cites Fla. R. App. P. 9.410(a), which as quoted on page 15 lets the court, on its own motion and after ten days' notice, impose sanctions for a filing that is frivolous or in bad faith.

Nothing is imposed by this opinion. The Bar referral is offered as an example of what a sanction might be, and the opinion contains no fine, no referral and no finding of a disciplinary violation. Page 18 carries the standard notice that the opinion is not final until disposition of a timely-filed motion for rehearing. The no-AI direction reaches the show-cause response and nothing else; it is not a direction to any other lawyer or to the Florida Bar.

One procedural fact is easy to miss. Page 1 records "No appearance for respondent." No opposing party appeared to brief the petition; the show-cause order comes from the court itself, under the own-motion power in rule 9.410(a) that the court cites on page 15 and that we describe above. The opinion says nothing about what was or was not filed on her behalf below; the background section records her contempt motion in the trial court.

Suspected, not established

The court never finds that AI wrote the filings. Page 1 says the opinion addresses "what appears to be" AI slop. Page 2 says the court suspects that the filings of counsel contain AI-generated components. Footnote 2 on the same page adds that while some content appears AI-generated, other portions "appear too unpolished to have been produced by AI." Page 5 says the filings "contain indicia of non-human authorship." Page 12 says the court suspects AI generated bogus arguments from mistranscriptions in an unofficial rough draft transcript. Page 13 says the unnatural presentation of the arguments "further leads us to suspect AI was used."

Every one of those is a statement of suspicion drawn from the text of the filings. There is no admission, no tool identified, no drafting record and no evidentiary hearing on authorship. We report the court's suspicion as the court's suspicion and do not upgrade it.

The court then makes authorship beside the point. The two closing sentences of the analysis on page 13 are the passage we have set out as the quotation below: whether this was AI-generated, AI-assisted or something else makes no difference, and an attorney is obligated to stand behind any submission to a court. That is why the show-cause order does not depend on proving AI use. It rests on the content of what was signed and filed.

The red flags the court lists

The opinion works through the filings under its own headings. The first, on page 5, is the emergency request: a 61-page emergency petition filed 31 July 2026 that, the court says, showed no imminent irreparable harm of any kind and sought priority over other litigants, which the court calls an abuse of procedure. Page 6 lists a second flag, the attempt to review eight separate rulings in a single writ proceeding, and a third, the citation of the court's own unpublished order in an unrelated 2023 case, which the court says has no precedential value and was cited solely to disparage the judge.

Pages 7 to 13 take the motion to disqualify apart. The court says the 33-page motion argues 14 grounds and then reproduces a lettered list that runs from A to O; we note the count and the list as printed and do not reconcile them. It opens with the argument that filing a disqualification motion automatically stays the trial court, which the court on page 7 calls a frivolous argument "often seen in AI hallucinations" and one this court has already flagged in Avery v. Beauzil. Several allegations are found contrary to the hearing transcript: that the judge systematically muzzled counsel, that proceedings continued while counsel's audio malfunctioned, that counsel was prevented from moving to disqualify, and that the judge repeatedly misnamed and misgendered counsel, a claim the court traces on pages 11 to 12 to an unofficial rough draft transcript that the official transcript does not support.

The court's label for the pattern is "issue churning", page 12. It describes the petition as raising scattershot arguments, some never raised below, and quotes a "cumulative effect" paragraph at length before concluding on page 13 that this typifies a laundry list of convoluted arguments that no competent lawyer should make. Page 11 separately quotes a passage from paragraph 77 of the motion under the heading "Legal Gibberish" and says the filings emphasise seemingly random sentences in bold and italics.

Those characterisations are the court's. We have read the opinion, not the underlying filings, and we do not independently confirm any of them.

The rules the court says are implicated

Pages 14 and 15 name the professional rules without deciding any violation. The court first restates the signature representation in Fla. R. Gen. Prac. & Jud. Admin. 2.515(d)(2): by signing, counsel represents that she has read the document, that there are good grounds to support it and that it is not interposed for delay. That rule is in force and unamended by this opinion. The court says an attorney, no less than a pro se litigant, is responsible for the content of filings and should not be filing frivolous, scattershot arguments.

It then lists five Rules Regulating the Florida Bar that it says counsel's conduct "implicates": 4-1.1 (Competence), 4-2.1 (Adviser), 4-3.1 (Meritorious Claims and Contentions), 4-3.2 (Expediting Litigation) and 4-3.3 (Candor toward the Tribunal). Implicates is the court's verb and we keep it. No finding under any of those rules is made.

The fee rule is the part practitioners will read twice. The court says the conduct "also raises ethical questions concerning billing" under rule 4-1.5, quotes the first reasonable-fee factor (time, labour, novelty, difficulty and the skill required), and then writes: "It takes almost no skill and little time to generate AI slop." It follows that with the statement that a lawyer who files such slop violates the duty to exercise independent professional judgment under rule 4-2.1. That sentence is a general statement in the court's voice; the opinion makes no finding that this lawyer billed for anything, and no billing record is in the opinion.

The comparison to pro se litigants runs through the opinion. On page 2 the court says it has recently sanctioned vexatious pro se litigants for abusive AI filings, citing Avery v. Beauzil (May 27, 2026) and Gouldy v. Chiasson (July 22, 2026). On page 14 it returns to Avery alone as an example of abusive AI filing clogging dockets, and says courts expect more from an attorney, citing the Second District's August 2026 decision in Capital Standard for that proposition. On page 15 it says counsel's filings and motion practice resemble what it typically sees from vexatious pro se litigants. We read that as the court situating this order within its existing sanctions practice, and we do not read it as announcing a new tier of liability.

Why this is not the fabricated-citation story

Footnote 1 on page 1 is the sentence that separates this opinion from the fabricated-citation sanctions cases: "The AI slop problem we address here has nothing to do with hallucinated law or false legal citations." The footnote then quotes a January 2026 Bloomberg Law commentary to the effect that citations can be real and cases can exist while the reasoning reveals assembly by a tool, and the court says it agrees that AI drafting without meaningful attorney involvement undermines the premise of qualified legal representation.

The statement that the citations are real is the commentators' framing, adopted by the court as a description of the problem. The opinion does not say it checked every authority in every filing, and we do not say so either. What the opinion does establish is narrower and, for a signing lawyer, harder to defend against: the court is prepared to issue a show-cause order on the basis of argument quality, record fidelity and motion practice, with the AI question left at suspicion.

For the Florida practitioner the practical reading is this. The Second District's Capital Standard decision, as quoted by this court on page 14, addressed a practising attorney relying on generative AI without double-checking the results. This opinion, if the sanctions inquiry proceeds, treats incoherent and record-contradicted argument as sanctionable on the same signature rule, whatever produced it. Whether any appellate sanction follows depends on the response the opinion orders within ten days and on what the court does with it. This opinion imposes none, and we did not open the docket after 16 September 2026.

What we did not verify

What we opened: the 18-page opinion PDF served by the Florida Courts media host at the URL in the primary links, read end to end from the caption on page 1 through the order to show cause on page 15, the concurrence line and appendix on pages 16 to 17, and the finality notice on page 18. The date "[September 16, 2026]" and the case number appear on page 1. The quotation below is on page 13; in the extracted text a line break falls between "or" and "something", which we have collapsed to a single space and changed nothing else. The opinion uses typographic apostrophes and dashes; every passage set inside quotation marks in this article is one that contains neither and was checked character for character against the extracted text, and passages that contain one are paraphrased without quotation marks or quoted only up to the dash.

What we did not open: the underlying petition, the Urgent Omnibus Application, the emergency motion, the three motions in limine, the motion to disqualify, either transcript of the 14 July 2026 hearings, the trial court's contempt order, the Fourth District's Administrative Order 2014-1, Avery v. Beauzil, Gouldy v. Chiasson, Eclectic Synergy, Capital Standard, the Bloomberg Law commentary quoted in footnote 1, section 61.403 of the Florida Statutes, the text of rules 2.330, 2.515 and 9.410, the Rules Regulating the Florida Bar, or the Fourth District docket for anything filed after 16 September 2026. We describe every filing and every authority only as this opinion describes it.

What we refuse to claim: we do not say the attorney used AI, because the court says only that it suspects so. We do not say every citation in the filings was accurate, because the opinion does not state that the court audited every citation and the real-citations language is quoted commentary. We do not say an appellate sanction, fine, Bar referral or disciplinary finding against counsel has issued, because this opinion imposes none and we did not read the docket after it. The trial court sanctions recorded on page 4 run against the petitioner, not counsel, and are a separate matter. We do not say the attorney overbilled, because the court raised a question and made no finding. We do not say this opinion creates a new Florida rule, an AI ban or a duty on supervising partners, because it applies existing rules to one case and the no-AI direction reaches only the show-cause response. We do not give a calendar due date for that response, because the opinion states ten days and prints none. We do not say the opinion is final, because page 18 says it is not until any timely rehearing motion is disposed of.

Informational analysis for working professionals, not legal advice. Confirm how any rule applies to your situation with qualified counsel.

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