On June 17, 2026, the Michigan Court of Appeals published Barber v Morawa and settled a question Michigan lawyers had been dancing around: the duty of reasonable inquiry under MCR 1.109(E)(5) is measured by an objective standard, subjective good faith is irrelevant, and a lawyer remains personally responsible for the accuracy of every document he signs and files. The court went further. It treated the failure to timely correct defects the lawyer already knew about as part of the sanctionable pattern, not as mitigation.
What the case was actually about
Joyce Barber sued an orthopedic surgeon over a hip replacement performed at Ascension Providence Hospital in October 2020. After a five-day trial, the jury returned a verdict finding no negligence. On the poll, five jurors confirmed the verdict and the foreperson did not. Five was enough in a civil action, so the verdict stood.
What happened next is the part that produced a published opinion. With the trial court’s permission, the judge and trial counsel had an off-the-record conversation with the jurors. Barber then moved for a new trial or an evidentiary hearing, alleging that jurors had consulted outside sources, conducted independent research, pressured the foreperson, and that alternates had sat in on deliberations. Her lawyers attached affidavits describing that off-the-record conversation.
The affidavits were not notarized. Under Michigan law an unnotarized affidavit is invalid, and a trial court is not required to consider it. Since every material fact in the motion lived outside the record, MCR 2.611(D)(1) required valid affidavit support, and there was none. Counsel argued that the unsworn statements carried the same force as a sworn declaration under the Uniform Unsworn Foreign Declarations Act. That statute expressly does not apply to declarants located inside the United States.
The merits ruling was therefore short. Even assuming valid affidavits, Barber never explained how any alleged irregularity changed the outcome. Her theory of presumed prejudice rested on Remmer v United States, a criminal case, and on Sixth Amendment protections that do not reach a civil malpractice trial. The trial court, which had been present for the post-verdict conversation, recalled it differently than Barber’s counsel described it and credited the opposing account. Affirmed.
The pattern the court built
The sanctions analysis is where this opinion earns its shelf life. The Court of Appeals did not treat the fabricated citations as a single lapse. It laid out a sequence, and the sequence is what did the damage.
By the time counsel filed the appellate brief, he had already been told twice that his filings contained fabricated authority. That is the fact the court kept returning to.
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Open The Lab ?The holding: objective, and only objective
MCR 1.109(E)(5) provides that an attorney’s signature certifies the attorney has read the document and that, to the best of his knowledge, information, and belief formed after reasonable inquiry, the document is well grounded in fact and warranted by existing law. The operative words are after reasonable inquiry, and they qualify everything that follows.
The Court of Appeals reaffirmed the settled construction: reasonableness is determined by an objective standard, and the attorney’s subjective good faith is irrelevant. The court reached back to Attorney General v Harkins for that proposition and to the leading Michigan court rules treatise for the reason behind it. The reasonable-inquiry requirement exists precisely to reach the pleader who makes an inaccurate assertion not maliciously but carelessly. A legal argument can be advanced in complete good faith and still fail the rule.
The court removed the escape hatch most sanctions respondents reach for first. Sincerity is not a defense. Remorse is not a defense. The question is not whether the signer meant well. The question is whether a reasonable attorney, doing the verification the signature already certifies was done, would have caught it.
Because MCR 1.109(E) descends from FR Civ P 11 by way of the repealed MCR 2.114, the panel borrowed federal reasoning. Federal courts have held with some consistency that filing a signed pleading containing hallucinated citations violates Rule 11, and that readily admitting the mistake does not cure the failure to make reasonable inquiry. Michigan has now joined that line explicitly.
The correction failure is the second holding
The more consequential move, and the one that will get cited in Michigan trial courts for years, is what the panel did with timing.
The court listed counsel’s failure to timely correct a fabricated appellate citation after the defense identified it as one of the enumerated components of the violation. Not as an aggravating factor considered at the sanction stage. As part of the conduct constituting the breach. The same treatment applied to the Notice of Correction, which the court described as a filing that repeated the same kind of verification failure it was supposed to remedy.
The old practical rule in Michigan trial courts was that a fabricated or unsupported citation could be neutralized by conceding it when caught. Barber forecloses that. Once a filer is on notice that a document contains defective authority, the clock starts, and silence in the next filing is itself evidence. A reply brief that addresses everything except the defect the other side just identified is a document the court will read as a choice.
What the sanction actually is
Two independent authorities carried the result. Under MCR 7.216(C)(1)(b), the Court of Appeals may assess actual and punitive damages when an appellate brief was grossly lacking in propriety, violated court rules, or grossly disregarded the requirements of a fair presentation of the issues. The panel found that standard met.
Separately, MCR 1.109(E)(6) provides that when a document is signed in violation of the rule the court shall impose an appropriate sanction, which may include the reasonable expenses incurred because of the filing, including attorney fees. Michigan appellate authority treats that language as mandatory. Once the violation is found, the court has no discretion to decline. Its discretion runs only to what the sanction is.
The panel remanded for an evidentiary hearing to determine the actual damages and reasonable attorney fees the defendant incurred because of the vexatious appeal, and directed that the amount be paid by plaintiff’s counsel personally. It then directed the Clerk to forward the opinion to the Attorney Grievance Commission for possible investigation.
The client, whose only role in this was hiring a lawyer, does not pay. That allocation matters. It converts a professional-competence failure into a personal financial event for the professional, which is the only version of accountability that changes behavior.
Why this is bigger than artificial intelligence
The AI framing is going to dominate the coverage of this opinion, and it is not wrong. The panel said plainly that artificial intelligence may be useful for research and drafting but does not alter an attorney’s professional obligations, and that lawyers remain responsible for the filings they sign and submit. They must verify the authorities exist, read them, and confirm they support the propositions asserted.
But strip the technology out and the holding does not change. Nothing in Barber depends on how the fabricated citation got into the brief. A citation invented by a chatbot and a citation copied wrong from a memo from 2003 land in exactly the same place under an objective standard. Artificial intelligence is the delivery mechanism the court happened to be looking at. The rule it announced governs every filing, every signature, every time.
That is the part self-represented litigants and court-watchers should sit with. The reasonable-inquiry duty attaches to the signature, and the signature is the certification. It does not attach to the drafting process, the research budget, the size of the firm, or how busy anyone was. The court described what it was looking at as repeated carelessness regarding an independent duty to verify. Independent is the word doing the work. The duty is not delegable to a research tool, a paralegal, a junior associate, or a prior filing.
Michigan has no rule requiring disclosure of generative AI use in filings, and Barber did not create one. It did not need to, because the existing signature rule already reached the conduct. The open question is whether the State Court Administrative Office treats this opinion as sufficient, or whether it moves toward a certification requirement of the kind several federal districts have adopted. The stronger argument is that the rule is already adequate and the gap was enforcement. Barber is the enforcement.
The practical read
For anyone litigating in Michigan, opposing counsel included, three things changed on June 17.
First, identifying a fabricated or unsupported citation in a responsive brief now does real work. It puts the other side on notice, and notice is what converts a single error into a pattern. The record of who flagged what and when is now part of the sanctions record.
Second, the window to correct is short and the correction has to be a real one. A notice that concedes error while introducing new unsupported authority is worse than no notice, because it demonstrates that the stated verification protocols do not exist.
Third, the sanction follows the signature. Any lawyer who signs a document has personally certified that the verification happened. If it did not, the objective standard will find that out, and the good-faith explanation that used to soften the landing is now formally irrelevant.
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