Seven citations that do not exist, filed on State Farm's behalf

A lawyer preparing motions for State Farm in a Los Angeles County fire case ran legal research through an AI program called Irys, and seven of the decisions cited across eight motions in limine do not exist. The motions carry the insurer’s name, and the program came in on counsel’s side of the engagement.

This week’s story: the program sat at the law firm

The case is Meni-Siliga v. A’s Contractor, Inc., in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The first five of the eight motions in limine were filed and served on March 31, and no source gives a date for the other three. Plaintiff’s counsel raised the fabricated citations at the Final Status Conference on August 7, the first reporting we found appeared on August 18, and the filings themselves reached print on August 24, when Eugene Volokh reproduced the declaration that names the program, Irys, and concedes the step that was skipped: “I should have, but neglected to perform a cite check on all of the authorities cited in the motions in limine …”

Now the instruments. Exhibit A of the AI Risk Evaluation Supplement, as the working group now calls the pilot instrument, counts the regulated entity’s own use of AI systems, and the use here belongs to a firm the insurer retained rather than to the insurer’s own operations. The model bulletin reaches further, asking each AIS Program to address the insurer’s process for “acquiring, using, or relying on” third-party data “to develop AI Systems” and “AI Systems developed by a third party.” Reliance is the prong that fits, except that the reliance here ran from the insurer to its counsel and only then to the program. Our reading is that the bulletin has in view an AI system the insurer itself acquires, uses, or relies on, and the decision to use this one was taken inside the firm holding the engagement. The same limit runs through our reading of the bulletin’s third-party section, and the nearest thing to a retained firm in our exhibit-by-exhibit account of the instrument is an Exhibit B narrative question on oversight of professional service providers, the actuarial, claim, MGA, and audit kind.

State Farm is one of several defendants in the case, and the eight motions were filed on its behalf. A company spokesman told the Los Angeles Times that State Farm expects its external counsel “to conform to the highest level of ethical standards and professionalism, including in their use of AI and confirming the accuracy of all legal filings,” in the wording Eugene Volokh reproduces. Our account of ungoverned AI use inside carriers puts the bulletin’s limit at a distribution partner’s own tooling, the point where visibility usually gives out. A firm retained for one matter is further from that: the carrier’s hold on it is the engagement, and the engagement’s wording on AI is the extent of that hold.

On August 25 the trade outlet The Insurer reported that plaintiff’s counsel has asked the court to deny the affected motions in limine and to issue an order to show cause regarding sanctions. We could not open that report, because the page returns an authorization error to this newsletter, and no other outlet we reached carries the request. No ruling on the citations has been reported anywhere we could reach as of that date. Anyone carrying this into a governance meeting should attribute the admission to the lawyers who filed it and describe the sanctions request as pending and second-hand.

What to do this week

• Outside counsel guidelines are the first document to pull, and the paragraph to look for is the one governing generative AI in papers filed under your name. If there is no such paragraph, that absence is a finding you can date and file today.
• The revised supplement is due out for public comment at the beginning of September. Decide now who reads it and who drafts the response: two exposure periods are planned for the fall, and the names you set this week may serve for both rounds.
• Your AI register probably has no line for third parties who file or correspond in your name. Add that line with the name of whoever inside the company owns the relationship, and where nobody can say what tools those firms run, the engagement letter is where a right to ask would have to come from.

On the Docket

• September 2026: The revised supplement goes out for a public exposure comment period at the beginning of the month, and the pilot’s last month runs alongside it. Nothing had been exposed as of our check on August 25: the newest exposure draft listed on the working group’s page is still the AI Systems Evaluation Tool posted in September 2025. Anyone who means to file a comment, plus the companies involved in the pilot, whose written feedback has been received and will help inform the revision. NAIC meeting minutes

• October 2026: Trial in Meni-Siliga v. A’s Contractor, Inc., the Los Angeles County case in which the fabricated citations were filed. The claim on trial is a 2020 house fire, and no source says the citations or the pending sanctions request will be taken up on that date. Anyone following the case, for whom this is the next dated event in it. CalMatters

• November 2026: The Fall National Meeting. The NAIC’s pilot project summary puts one item on that date, consideration of the updated instrument for adoption, and this newsletter has carried the November item since July. The August 13 minutes add something at a different level: the chair stated a goal for the two exposure periods planned this fall, finalizing the supplement and adopting the final version there. The calendar item is consideration, and the adoption is a goal the chair stated. Carriers whose exam readiness files were built against the current text. NAIC pilot project summary

This week in brief

Governance

The August 13 minutes reached the public file on August 25, twelve days after the session they record, self-dated August 23 and marked draft pending adoption. The working group’s summary of that session said “Public updates will be provided throughout the pilot process,” and this is the record that followed.

One data point

An ad hoc questionnaire, outside the usual process. That is one of the two routes the chair described on August 13, and the minutes print them side by side: “some states used the supplement as part of a market conduct or financial examination that was already planned, while others used it as an ad hoc questionnaire outside the typical examination process.” Each state may also “modify or add questions to meet its specific needs.” Issue 06 counted four settings in the one-page summary of that same session, and the two routes here are the minutes’ own cut of the same pilot rather than a shorter version of the four. The exam sequence in our playbook on the AI documents a market conduct exam asks for opens with a notice and a confirmed scope, and our reading, close to the one Issue 06 drew from the summary’s general regulatory inquiry, is that a questionnaire sent outside an examination reaches a company before either of those exists, which is more than the minutes say. The minutes do move the route itself off our own arithmetic and into the working group’s wording.

Two documents carry whatever hold a carrier has here: the engagement that retains an outside firm, and the guidelines that travel with it. Both are already inside the company. Reply to the email this issue arrived in, and it reaches the editor.

– The Editor, InsureAI Wire