The Board of Immigration Appeals has published its first precedent decision addressing attorney discipline for artificial intelligence hallucinations in legal briefs. In Matter of Sethi, 30 I&N Dec. 112 (BIA 2026), Interim Decision #4254, decided today, October 1, 2026, the Board suspended an immigration attorney from practice before the BIA, the Immigration Courts, and the Department of Homeland Security for six months, effective retroactively to June 13, 2026. The suspension is reciprocal, which means it was triggered by, and tracks, a prior suspension of the same attorney by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Malkeet Lnu v. Blanche, 177 F.4th 1014 (9th Cir. 2026).
The underlying misconduct involved what are now commonly called AI hallucinations, which are fabricated citations or passages generated by an artificial intelligence tool that look authoritative on the page but refer to nothing in the actual record of law. The attorney in Matter of Sethi submitted a brief to the Ninth Circuit containing citations to cases that did not exist, then filed a Motion to Correct the brief in which he characterized the fabricated citations as “typographical errors,” a claim the Ninth Circuit found implausible because a typographical error cannot explain how a nonexistent case was cited in the first place. The Ninth Circuit inferred from the circumstances that the attorney knew the citations were hallucinated and that he had made knowingly false statements to the court about the cause of the errors. The BIA adopted those findings for reciprocal discipline purposes and applied the standard framework that governs when a federal court suspension triggers parallel discipline before the Immigration Courts, the BIA, and DHS.
As a procedural note, the decision was initially issued unpublished on September 15, 2026, and was redesignated as precedent on October 1, 2026, with editorial changes consistent with precedent designation. Matter of Sethi is the fifteenth precedential immigration decision in about seven weeks in the ongoing series shifting law in the government’s direction, following Matter of DIJI, Matter of A-E-V-M-, Matter of S-K-E-, Matter of Kamalov, Matter of V-S-A-, Matter of A-V-O-, Matter of Cuber, Matter of Mendez Maldonado, Matter of Borges Borsoi, Matter of K-K-U-J-, Matter of M-K-, Matter of Y-M-B-, Matter of G-R-B-, and Matter of Cornejo-Aguilar.
Mike Singh Sethi is an immigration attorney. In connection with a case before the Ninth Circuit captioned Malkeet Lnu v. Blanche, he submitted an initial brief that cited cases that did not exist. The nonexistent citations were later identified as AI hallucinations, meaning that an artificial intelligence tool (likely a large language model used for legal research or drafting) had generated plausible-looking case citations with real-sounding party names and reporter citations but with no connection to any actual judicial decision.
After the fake citations were identified, Mr. Sethi filed a Motion to Correct the brief, a procedural filing used to update or amend a prior submission. In the Motion to Correct, he characterized the fabricated citations as the product of “typographical errors.” The Ninth Circuit found this characterization implausible. A typographical error occurs when an attorney mistypes a known citation, such as transposing numbers in a volume or reporter page. It does not explain how a citation to a case that has never existed could appear in a brief.
In response to the Ninth Circuit’s inquiries, Mr. Sethi admitted that he did not personally read the cases cited in briefs drafted by his firm’s brief writers before filing them. He later conceded, after repeated denials, that it was “more likely than not” that AI had been used in drafting the brief. The Ninth Circuit also identified a Notice of Errata (a filing used to inform a court of corrections to a prior submission) that Mr. Sethi had filed in a separate case, in which he had identified two erroneous citations and requested to replace them with real ones but had failed to disclose that the two erroneous citations were themselves AI hallucinations.
On June 3, 2026, the Ninth Circuit issued a decision suspending Mr. Sethi from the practice of law in the Ninth Circuit for a period of six months, effective June 13, 2026.
The BIA proceedings followed the standard reciprocal discipline track. On June 15, 2026, the Disciplinary Counsel for the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which is the agency within the Department of Justice that oversees the Immigration Courts and the BIA, filed a Joint Notice of Intent to Discipline (NID) with the Disciplinary Counsel for DHS. A Notice of Intent to Discipline is the charging document that formally initiates attorney discipline proceedings before the BIA. The counsel also filed a Joint Petition for Immediate Suspension, requesting that Mr. Sethi be immediately suspended pending the outcome of the proceedings. On July 1, 2026, the Board granted the Joint Petition for Immediate Suspension.
Through July and August 2026, Mr. Sethi filed a Motion to Set Aside the immediate suspension, an Answer to the Amended NID, and an Omnibus Brief in Further Support of the Motion to Set Aside. The Disciplinary Counsel moved for summary adjudication, which is a request to resolve the proceeding without a full hearing because the material facts are not genuinely in dispute. On September 15, 2026, the Board issued the decision (initially unpublished) suspending Mr. Sethi for six months. On October 1, 2026, the Board redesignated the decision as precedent.
The Board decided three things.
First, the Board denied Mr. Sethi’s Motion to Set Aside the immediate suspension. Under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.103(a), the Board must enter an order immediately suspending a practitioner upon a certified copy of a federal court suspension or disbarment, and the Board may set aside such an order only upon a showing of good cause and when it appears in the interest of justice to do so. The Board concluded that Mr. Sethi had not made that showing.
Second, the Board granted the Disciplinary Counsel’s Motion for Summary Adjudication on the Amended NID. The Board concluded that no material factual disputes existed that would warrant a hearing before an adjudicating official, because Mr. Sethi’s claims about his subjective lack of knowledge of the AI use had already been considered and rejected by the Ninth Circuit, and the Board does not have authority to collaterally attack (meaning to challenge indirectly through a separate proceeding) the Ninth Circuit’s findings of fact and conclusions of law.
Third, the Board imposed reciprocal discipline in the form of a six-month suspension from practice before the BIA, the Immigration Courts, and DHS, effective retroactively to June 13, 2026, which is the same effective date as the Ninth Circuit’s suspension order. The suspension does not exceed the length of the Ninth Circuit’s suspension.
Reciprocal discipline is the doctrine by which disciplinary action taken against an attorney by one authorized body (such as a state bar or a federal court) can trigger parallel discipline before another body with authority over the same attorney. In the immigration context, when an attorney is suspended or disbarred by a federal court or by any state bar, the Disciplinary Counsels for EOIR and DHS can initiate reciprocal discipline proceedings before the BIA, which has authority over practice before the Immigration Courts and the Board itself.
Under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.103(b)(2), a certified copy of a federal court suspension creates a rebuttable presumption of professional misconduct, meaning the Board presumes the misconduct occurred and that disciplinary sanctions should follow unless the attorney proves otherwise. The Board applied this framework in Matter of Kronegold, 25 I&N Dec. 157 (BIA 2010), Matter of Truong, 24 I&N Dec. 52 (BIA 2006), Matter of Ramos, 23 I&N Dec. 843 (BIA 2005), and Matter of Gadda, 23 I&N Dec. 645 (BIA 2003), all of which Matter of Sethi cites.
To rebut the presumption, the attorney must show by clear and convincing evidence (a higher standard of proof than preponderance of the evidence but lower than beyond a reasonable doubt, typically understood as evidence that produces a firm belief or conviction) one of three things:
Mr. Sethi raised all three arguments, and the Board rejected each of them in turn. He had not been deprived of due process in the Ninth Circuit proceedings, as he had received notice and an opportunity to respond. There was no infirmity of proof, as the Ninth Circuit’s findings were supported by circumstantial evidence from which actual knowledge could be properly inferred under applicable law. And financial hardship, loss of practice income, and inconvenience to clients, while real, do not rise to the level of grave injustice as that term is understood in the attorney discipline context, because as the Board noted citing Matter of Kronegold, if financial hardship by itself established grave injustice, almost any attorney whose livelihood depends on legal practice could avoid reciprocal discipline.
The most doctrinally interesting part of Matter of Sethi is the Board’s response to Mr. Sethi’s argument that reciprocal discipline for AI-related misconduct is “unprecedented,” that no other federal circuit courts have suspended attorneys for conduct involving generative AI, and that extending suspension in this context would “magnify an outlier penalty rather than simply giving ordinary reciprocal effect to a routine disciplinary judgment.”
The Board rejected this argument directly, in language worth quoting in substance: an attorney must conduct themselves in accordance with governing rules of professional conduct regardless of the tools they use to prepare and present cases. The specific misconduct the Ninth Circuit identified included citing cases that did not exist, attributing quotations to opinions in which the quoted language did not appear, misrepresenting the content of real legal authority, failing to identify existing law the attorney claimed supported his arguments, knowingly making false statements of law to the court, and failing to correct false statements previously made to the tribunal. Any or all of these actions can be taken with or without AI, and any or all of them render an attorney subject to discipline by an authorized tribunal.
The Board’s reasoning collapses the attempted distinction between AI-related misconduct and traditional misconduct. The novelty of AI as a drafting tool does not create a novel category of professional conduct that is immune from existing rules. The duty of candor to the tribunal, the duty of competent representation, and the duty to verify the accuracy of representations made to a court all exist regardless of whether the attorney drafted the brief personally, delegated it to a human associate, or generated it with an AI tool. The attorney’s signature on a filing represents a certification of its contents, and that certification is not transferable to the tool used to produce the draft.
For attorneys watching this issue develop across jurisdictions, Matter of Sethi places the immigration bar on notice that the BIA will apply the standard reciprocal discipline framework to AI-related sanctions imposed by any federal court or state bar. The framework does not treat AI as a special case.
Many attorneys, including immigration practitioners, use AI tools responsibly in their day-to-day work. AI-assisted legal research, document review, summarization, and drafting are increasingly common across the profession, and the question is no longer whether to engage with these tools but how to engage with them in a way that complies with professional responsibility obligations. Matter of Sethi clarifies several practice points.
Every citation must be verified by the attorney before filing. Verification means pulling up the actual case in a legal research database (Westlaw, Lexis, Fastcase, or the equivalent) and confirming that the case exists, that the citation is accurate, that the quoted language appears in the opinion as represented, and that the case stands for the proposition the brief claims it stands for. This is the attorney’s own responsibility and cannot be delegated to the AI tool, to a brief writer, or to anyone else without the attorney retaining ultimate accountability.
Verification practices must be adequate to catch hallucinations. If a brief writer or an AI tool generates text that includes citations the attorney has not personally verified, the attorney must verify before filing. The practice described in Matter of Sethi, where the attorney filed briefs drafted by brief writers without reading the cases cited, is not a defensible practice regardless of whether the brief writer used AI. The Ninth Circuit treated the attorney’s admitted practice of not vetting citations as itself creating an “inherent risk” of citing fake authority.
Candor to the tribunal does not permit evasive characterizations of errors. When fake citations are discovered, an attorney’s response to the court must be forthright about the cause of the error. Characterizing hallucinated citations as “typographical mistakes” when the attorney knows or has reason to know that AI generated them is itself a violation of the duty of candor, independent of the underlying error.
Disclosure of AI use is an evolving issue, but when a court directly asks about AI use, denial or evasion carries significant discipline risk. The Ninth Circuit inferred Mr. Sethi’s actual knowledge of AI use from his repeated denials followed by a late concession that AI use was “more likely than not,” combined with his implausible “typographical error” explanation for the fake citations. Attorneys who use AI in brief preparation should be prepared to describe their process honestly when asked.
Office supervision policies carry weight here, because for firms that use brief writers, paralegals, contract attorneys, or junior associates in brief preparation, the supervising attorney retains the duty to verify work product before it is submitted under their name. If AI use at the staff level creates risk of hallucinated citations making it into filings, the firm’s internal review and verification processes must be adequate to catch them before anything leaves the office.
For clients considering hiring an immigration attorney, Matter of Sethi suggests several practical steps worth taking before signing a retainer agreement.
Verify the attorney’s standing with their state bar. Every licensed attorney is admitted to practice in at least one state, and that admission is a matter of public record through the state bar association’s website. Attorneys who are suspended or disbarred have those actions on their public record. If an attorney is currently suspended by a federal court or by their state bar, they are not eligible to represent you in immigration proceedings. A five-minute search of the state bar website before retaining counsel is a worthwhile precaution.
Ask the attorney about their practices for AI use and quality control. Most attorneys using AI responsibly will not object to a candid conversation about their process. If you ask whether the attorney uses AI in brief preparation and what their verification practices are, a responsible answer will describe how AI assists specific tasks (research summaries, first drafts, document review) and how the attorney personally verifies the output before relying on it. Evasive answers or refusals to discuss the topic should be taken seriously.
Request confirmation that the attorney will personally review any filings submitted on your behalf. The attorney of record signs filings and bears professional responsibility for their contents. Ask whether the attorney will personally review all substantive filings in your case before they are submitted. This is a basic professional practice and should not be a point of difficulty.
Checking disciplinary history before you hire is a reasonable step for any client making a significant retention decision, because public disciplinary records for attorneys are available through state bar associations, and in the immigration context, EOIR maintains a public list of practitioners who are currently suspended or disbarred from practice before the Immigration Courts, the BIA, and DHS.
Matter of Sethi is significant as the first precedent on AI-related attorney discipline in immigration law, but its scope has limits worth stating clearly.
The decision does not create a new category of professional misconduct. The underlying violations (citing nonexistent cases, misrepresenting legal authority, making false statements to a tribunal, failing to correct false statements) are longstanding duties that exist independent of AI. What Matter of Sethi does is confirm that these duties apply equally to conduct that involves AI tools.
The decision does not prohibit the use of AI in legal practice. Responsible AI use for research, drafting support, document review, and other tasks remains permissible. The decision addresses what happens when AI output is submitted to a court without adequate verification and when an attorney makes false statements about their AI use.
The decision does not change the reciprocal discipline framework itself. The standard established in Matter of Kronegold, Matter of Truong, Matter of Ramos, and Matter of Gadda remains unchanged. What Matter of Sethi does is apply that framework to a new fact pattern.
The decision does not eliminate the attorney’s right to contest reciprocal discipline. Attorneys subject to reciprocal discipline proceedings before the BIA retain the right to file an Answer, to move for a hearing before an adjudicating official where material factual disputes exist, and to appeal adverse decisions. What the Board held in Matter of Sethi is that Mr. Sethi had not identified any material factual dispute that was not already resolved by the Ninth Circuit.
The decision does not foreclose later reinstatement. Under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.107, a suspended practitioner may petition the Board for reinstatement to practice before the Board, the Immigration Courts, and DHS, subject to the terms of the suspension and any applicable requirements.
Matter of Sethi is the second attorney-discipline precedent in the recent BIA series, following Matter of Cuber, which formalized the Board’s default rule on reciprocal discipline. Together, the two decisions signal that the Board is actively using its precedent-publishing power to shape attorney discipline across the immigration bar, including by extending the reciprocal discipline framework into emerging areas such as AI-related misconduct.
For practitioners who follow the BIA precedent series as a whole, this pattern is worth noting. The series has included decisions that overrule long-settled precedent (Matter of A-V-O-, Matter of Mendez Maldonado), decisions that extend existing frameworks to new facts (Matter of G-R-B-), decisions that tighten discretionary standards (Matter of Y-M-B-, Matter of Kamalov), and now two decisions that shape attorney discipline directly. Attorneys practicing before the Immigration Courts, the BIA, and DHS should treat the series as a reminder that the standards governing their own practice are themselves subject to active development.
What is an AI hallucination?
An AI hallucination is content generated by an artificial intelligence tool that looks accurate and authoritative but is factually false or fabricated. In the legal context, AI hallucinations most commonly take the form of fake case citations with plausible-sounding party names, reporter citations, and page numbers, but that refer to cases that do not exist in the actual record of law. AI hallucinations can also take the form of fake quotations attributed to real cases, inaccurate summaries of real cases, or invented statutory provisions.
What is reciprocal discipline?
Reciprocal discipline is a mechanism by which an attorney who is disciplined (suspended, disbarred, or censured) by one authorized body can be subject to parallel discipline before another body with authority over the same attorney. In the immigration context, when a federal court or a state bar suspends an attorney, the Disciplinary Counsels for EOIR and DHS can initiate reciprocal discipline proceedings before the BIA, which has authority over practice before the Immigration Courts and the Board.
What is the standard the attorney must meet to rebut the presumption of misconduct?
Under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.103(b)(2), the attorney must show by clear and convincing evidence (a demanding standard of proof) that one of three things is true: the underlying disciplinary proceedings deprived the attorney of due process, there is an “infirmity of proof” establishing the misconduct, or discipline would result in “grave injustice.”
Can an attorney use AI in legal practice at all?
Yes. Responsible use of AI for research, drafting support, document review, and similar tasks is permissible and increasingly common across the legal profession. What Matter of Sethi addresses is the use of AI without adequate verification of its output, combined with false statements to the court about the use. Attorneys who verify every citation personally before filing, who maintain adequate quality-control processes, and who are candid about their practices when asked are not in the territory of Matter of Sethi.
Does Matter of Sethi apply only to attorneys suspended by the Ninth Circuit?
No. The reciprocal discipline framework the Board applies in Matter of Sethi applies to any federal court or state bar suspension or disbarment. The Ninth Circuit was the originating court in Mr. Sethi’s case, but the framework will apply equally to attorneys suspended by other federal courts of appeals, federal district courts, or state bars.
How can I verify whether an attorney is in good standing?
Every licensed attorney is admitted to practice in at least one state, and the state bar for that state maintains a public database searchable by name or bar number. For immigration practice specifically, EOIR maintains a public list of practitioners who are currently suspended or disbarred from practice before the Immigration Courts, the BIA, and DHS. Both resources are free to the public and can confirm an attorney’s current standing before you retain them.
Where can I find Matter of Sethi?
Matter of Sethi, 30 I&N Dec. 112 (BIA 2026), Interim Decision #4254, is a precedent decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals redesignated as precedent on October 1, 2026, after initial unpublished issuance on September 15, 2026. It is available through the Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review website.
Novo Legal Group is a bilingual, community-rooted human rights firm. Every attorney on our team is fluent in English and Spanish. We take our professional responsibility obligations seriously, including when it comes to the appropriate use of research and drafting tools, because our clients deserve representation they can trust. Our litigation team handles removal defense in Immigration Court, bond proceedings, appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals, petitions for review before federal courts of appeals including the Ninth and Tenth Circuits, and federal habeas corpus petitions for detained clients. If you are considering hiring an immigration attorney and want to understand how we approach your case, contact us. We will answer your questions, including about our quality-control practices, before you decide whether to retain us.