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A New Jersey US district court judge withdrew his decision in a biopharma securities case Wednesday after lawyers complained that his opinion contained numerous errors, including made-up quotes and misstated case outcomes.
Judge Julien Xavier Neals of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey on June 30 denied CorMedix Inc.'s request to dismiss a lawsuit by shareholders. “That opinion and order were entered in error,” according to a notice the court posted in the case docket on Wednesday. “A subsequent opinion and order will follow.”
Willkie Farr & Gallagher partner Andrew Lichtman, who represents CorMedix, wrote Neals on Tuesday, telling the judge he may want to “consider whether amendment or any other action should be taken” in regard to errors he made in his June 30 decision. Lawyers in a separate case earlier this month also pointed out flaws in Neals’ CorMedix opinion, saying it “contains pervasive and material inaccuracies.”
The case shows a rare example of a judge being called out for the sort of elementary mistakes in legal drafting that courts have more frequently pointed out in the work of lawyers. Such flaws have come to the fore as lawyers increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to assist in case preparation, though there is no mention of AI in the complaints the attorneys have directed at Judge Neals.
A representative for Neals’ chamber said the judge declined to comment on the case.
Absent Quotes
In the CorMedix case, a class of shareholders alleges the company lied about its drug DefenCath during an ill-fated bid to win US Food and Drug Administration approval.
Neals in his June 30 denial of CorMedix’s motion to dismiss referred to the court in Dang v. Amarin Corp. as describing defendants’ conduct as “classic evidence of scienter,” though that case didn’t contain the quote. He also quoted a court in a case involving tech consulting firm Intelligroup as saying that certifications by company executives became “false statements in their own right,” though that quotation doesn’t exist in the case.
Neals’ opinion referenced a case captioned Stichting Pensioenfonds Metaal en Techniek v. Verizon Commc’ns Inc. in the Southern District of New York, though Lichtman said no such case exists in that venue. “We believe the court was referring to a case with the same caption from the District of New Jersey,” the lawyer wrote.
Lichtman’s letter also noted that the opinion attributes two quotes to CorMedix the company is not alleged to have made. He noted in his letter to Neals, however, that he was not requesting reconsideration of the opinion.
Lichtman declined to comment.
AI ‘Carelessness’
Several lawyers have made news for AI-generated case citations that turned out to be false. Two Manhattan lawyers in 2023 were fined $5,000 for filing a ChatGPT-generated court brief. Last month, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth District of Texas imposed a $2,500 sanction against a lawyer for submitting a brief that cited non-existent cases.
“The use of AI or other technology does not excuse carelessness or failure to follow professional standards,” the panel of judges wrote.
Bruce Green, a legal ethics professor at Fordham Law School, noted that judges, too, can face sanctions for the kind of errors they find in lawyers’ work. Discipline rules state that a judge shall perform judicial and administrative duties competently and diligently, according to Green.
Neals’ June 30 opinion has already influenced a parallel case also playing out in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey. That case also centers on allegations by shareholders that a biopharma company—in this instance, Outlook Therapeutics Inc.—lied to them about a product.
Citing Neals’ decision as a “supplemental authority,” lawyers for Outlook shareholders argued against the company’s motion for dismissing the class action. A team of lawyers at Cooley who are defending Outlook raised the false citations in a July 15 response.
“The CorMedix decision contains pervasive and material inaccuracies,” Cooley lawyers Caroline Pignatelli and Sarah Lightdale said. “It mischaracterizes key authorities and includes quotations from case law and pleadings that cannot be found in the sources cited.”
The lawyers said the existence of fake quotes “at a minimum severely curtails any persuasive value” of the decision. The Cooley lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
Reached for comment, lawyers at Pomerantz who are representing shareholders in the case against Outlook, indicated they were withdrawing their notice of supplemental authority.
— With reporting by Elleiana Green
The case is In Re CorMedix Inc. Securities Litigation, D.N.J., 2:21-cv-14020, 7/22/25
