Oregon winery family feud turns into landmark court scandal over AI use
A fine of nearly 110 thousand dollars was the price paid by lawyers who tried to use artificial intelligence as a legal shortcut — and ended up turning a family dispute into one of the most striking cases of AI misuse in American courts.
The story begins at a winery in rural Oregon called Valley View Winery. An 80-acre family property with decades of history, vineyards carefully lined between two mountains, and black-and-white photos on the tasting room walls showing founder Frank Wisnovsky strolling through the fields with his young children. But behind that idyllic image, there was an inheritance dispute that had been dragging on for five years involving four siblings.
What nobody expected was that this case would make headlines for a reason completely unrelated to the family fight itself: legal citations invented by a chatbot 🤖. Magistrate Judge Mark D. Clarke of the U.S. District Court of Oregon did not mince words. He described the episode as a notable case, both in degree and volume of AI hallucinations — with the sharp tone of someone comparing the situation to a pinot noir that turned to vinegar. The litigation was already intense. But when artificial intelligence entered the picture, things took a turn nobody could have predicted — and the consequences were historic.
The Winery at the Eye of the Storm
Valley View Winery is not just any business. Founded in 1972 by Frank Wisnovsky, a civil engineer, and his wife Ann, a former secretary, the property was born from the couple’s desire for a change of pace and a permanent home to raise their four children. The land sits in Ruch, in southern Oregon, in an area first established by pioneer Peter Britt in the 1850s, making the winery one of the oldest in the Pacific Northwest.
Tragedy struck early. Just eight years after founding the winery, Frank passed away suddenly. Ann Wisnovsky, however, kept the business running as a legacy for her children. The oldest brother, Robert, ran operations for a few years but eventually moved on. The oldest sister, Joanne Couvrette, never came back after college. It was the two youngest siblings, Mark and Michael Wisnovsky, who joined their mother in the day-to-day work — growing grapes, selling wine, while she handled the bookkeeping and signed the checks.
In 2006, Ann gave the younger sons a minority stake in the winery business. Ten years later, in 2016, she signed documents agreeing to transfer the rest of the business to them and, after her death, the land where the vineyards sit as well. The previous arrangement, which had called for splitting the property among all four siblings, was set aside.
That is when things started heating up. In 2019, Joanne Couvrette filed, along with her mother, a new estate plan that directed the winery to herself and Robert. Shortly after, Joanne moved Ann from Oregon to Southern California, where Joanne herself lived. In 2021, Joanne sued Mark and Michael on behalf of their mother’s estate, seeking 12.6 million dollars in damages and accusing the brothers of having manipulated their mother into the earlier inheritance agreements. The brothers countersued that same year, accusing Joanne of trying to strip them of the assets that were rightfully theirs.
Ann Wisnovsky passed away in 2023 without seeing the dispute resolved.
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The Free Lawyer and the Phantom Citations
Joanne Couvrette hired a California attorney named Steve Brigandi, who agreed to represent her for free. The reason? Joanne’s daughter was dating Brigandi’s son, according to a voicemail Robert Wisnovsky left for his brother Michael. In the same message, Robert bragged about the financial advantage: We are not spending a dime compared with what you guys are spending. Give up. Make money and stop losing.
The problem is that Joanne ended up getting exactly what she paid for — which is to say, nothing of quality. The legal citations fabricated by artificial intelligence started showing up in court filings in an escalating and alarming pattern:
- January 2025: two fake citations in a filing submitted to the court.
- April 2025: seven fictitious citations in a new petition.
- May 2025: another 16 completely invented legal references — even after opposing counsel had already flagged the earlier ones.
One of the fabricated citations referenced a first-degree murder case that had absolutely nothing to do with winery contracts or fee recovery. It was the kind of absurdity that only a machine generating text without any real understanding of context could produce — and that only an inattentive human would let slide.
To make matters worse, shortly before the deadline for Joanne’s team to file their defense, Brigandi was rushed to the hospital. Four months later, his doctor explained that the attorney suffered from a severe kidney disease that had significantly impaired his cognitive ability in the preceding months. Judge Clarke, however, was unmoved. He wrote that Brigandi must be held accountable, adding that the court did not give full weight to the medical declaration due to the delay in presenting it.
When AI Starts Making Up Laws
The phenomenon known as artificial intelligence hallucination is nothing new for anyone following the tech industry. Large language models, commonly called LLMs, have a characteristic that can be extremely dangerous in technical settings: when they cannot find the correct answer, they simply fabricate one that looks plausible. In the legal field, this translates into citations of cases that never existed, references to laws that have been distorted, and entirely invented precedents — but written with such convincing confidence that they easily pass as legitimate to anyone who does not verify them.
With so many attorneys and litigants using chatbots to speed up their work, American judges have been flooded with fictitious arguments produced by AI tools. An online database tracking judicial sanctions for AI misuse, maintained by French attorney Damien Charlotin, already catalogs more than 1,300 cases — nearly triple the number recorded just five months earlier.
The Valley View Winery case stands out in this landscape for several reasons: the weight of the penalty, the emotional intensity of the family details, and the sheer absurdity of some of the fabricated citations. We are not talking about a one-off error or a slightly distorted reference. We are talking about entire filings propped up by arguments that simply did not exist in the real world.
Who actually wrote the filings?
This is where the case gets even more complicated. Judge Clarke mentioned there was persuasive evidence that Joanne Couvrette herself may have drafted the problematic petitions, not her attorney. The documents were packed with irrelevant citations, including references to free speech cases that had zero connection to the winery dispute.
Sandra Gustitus, one of the attorneys for Mark and Michael Wisnovsky, offered an interesting theory about what may have happened: The AI software appeared to be learning about her and pulling up research she had done in another case.
And that actually makes sense. Around the same time, Joanne Couvrette had been fired from her job for referring to pro-Palestinian protesters as terrorism sympathizers on Facebook, and she later claimed her dismissal was a violation of her free speech rights. It is possible that the chatbot she used blended research from different contexts, generating that toxic cocktail of disconnected references that ended up in the court record.
The Record Fine and Its Implications
The fine imposed was hefty and came from multiple angles. Attorney Steve Brigandi was penalized nearly 100 thousand dollars. Timothy Murphy, an Oregon attorney hired by Joanne to ensure Brigandi followed local procedural rules, faces more than 14 thousand dollars in sanctions for failing to meaningfully participate in the case. Murphy admitted that it never occurred to him that Brigandi might just be putting his name on petitions written by the client herself — but it seemed like that was what was happening, he said.
Beyond the fines, the judge made an even more drastic move: he permanently dismissed the lawsuit Joanne had filed against her brothers. In other words, her attempt to take the winery did not just fail — it was wiped out for good because of the conduct of her legal team (and possibly her own).
According to Damien Charlotin, the specialist who maintains the database on AI misuse in the judiciary, the monetary penalty in this case is likely the largest ever recorded. He notes that it is hard to be completely certain, since fine amounts in some cases are not publicly disclosed.
Curtis Glaccum, Joanne’s new attorney, challenged the court’s decision to punish her personally. If for any reason somebody wants to actively participate in their legal actions, it is still the attorney who is signing the document and presenting it to the court, he argued.
Typically, penalties for AI misuse in court are modest — a warning, the striking of a petition, a six-hour training session with the bar association. But the Valley View Winery case was treated as exceptional. Judge Clarke made it clear that the severity of the punishment was justified because Joanne and her attorneys were not transparent, forthcoming, or demonstrated remorse for their conduct.
What Is Left for the Family
Now, Valley View Winery is in the hands of the two younger brothers, Mark and Michael Wisnovsky. The operation produces about 12 thousand cases of wine per year. Even before racking up nearly 1 million dollars in legal costs, the brothers were not exactly swimming in profits — they earned just enough to cover the salaries of about eight full-time employees.
And the fight may not be over. Mark and Michael expect their sister to appeal the decision in every way possible. As Mark himself put it: People always say: I cannot believe it is family. I would say that this could only happen in a family.
What This Means for the Future of AI in Law
The legal sector is one of the most promising fields for applying artificial intelligence, and that is not going to change because of one isolated scandal. AI tools are already being used successfully for contract analysis, document review, case law research, and even outcome prediction in certain types of proceedings. The problem was never the technology itself — it was the way it was adopted in this specific case, without any criteria, without verification, and without professional accountability.
The most important lesson the Oregon winery case leaves behind is that artificial intelligence is a powerful tool, but it demands an equally competent operator. Fully delegating to a language model the responsibility for legal arguments that will be presented in court is the equivalent of signing a document without reading it. The technology can be an extraordinary ally in preparing litigation, but the ultimate responsibility — ethical and legal — remains human, and it always will.
The database maintained by Charlotin, with its more than 1,300 recorded cases and growing fast, is a constant reminder that this problem is far from solved. Every new case that surfaces reinforces the need for clear protocols, proper training, and above all, rigorous verification of any AI-generated content before it reaches a judge’s hands.
In the coming years, courts around the world will likely begin adopting clearer guidelines on the use of AI in legal proceedings. Some are already on that path. What the Valley View Winery episode does is accelerate that conversation, put the issue on the agenda with real urgency, and remind us that technological innovation without governance is not progress — it is risk. And when that risk involves a family inheritance, a business with more than 50 years of history, a record-setting fine, and a family that may never sit around the same table again, it becomes very hard to ignore just how big the problem really is. 🍷
