Key Points

  • The Fourth District Court of Appeal, in a per curiam opinion joined by Judges Gross, Levine and Shepherd, referred the petitioner's counsel to the Florida Bar after an order to show cause on frivolous filing.
  • The court said counsel's 82-page response did not deny using AI and instead defended the frivolous arguments addressed in the court's Sept. 16, 2026, opinion denying the prohibition petition.
  • Counsel acknowledged that a motion to disqualify she filed in the trial court contained a lengthy false quotation attributed to a Fourth District case, which she called human error under time pressure.
  • The court said counsel appeared to acknowledge intentionally bringing a false claim that the trial judge mocked her, based on misspellings in an unofficial rough transcript that misspelled many participants' names.
  • The opinion is marked not final until disposition of timely-filed motion for rehearing.

A Florida appeals court on Oct. 21 referred a lawyer to the Florida Bar after she acknowledged that a motion she filed in a trial court contained a lengthy false quotation attributed to one of the appeals court's own decisions, and after she filed a sanctions response that the judges said did not deny using artificial intelligence.

The Fourth District Court of Appeal acted in a per curiam opinion joined by Judges Gross, Levine and Shepherd. The panel wrote that the lawyer's 82-page response to its order to show cause "misses the point."

The opinion's sole disposition is the referral. Along the way, the panel wrote that a lawyer's taking responsibility for a pleading she signed does not relieve her of responsibility for its contents. The judges also wrote that she appeared to acknowledge intentionally bringing a false claim that a trial judge mocked her, based on typographical errors in an unofficial transcript. "No competent attorney, much less one who holds herself out as board certified, should file a similar petition in an appellate court," the panel wrote of the underlying petition.

The case began as a petition for a writ of prohibition directed to the Circuit Court for the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in Broward County and Judge Elaine Alexandra A. Carbuccia. The petitioner was Lorie Jean Lisandrillo. The respondent, Renee Palozzi, did not appear in the Fourth District.

On Sept. 16, in an earlier opinion in Lisandrillo v. Palozzi, the Fourth District denied the petition and ordered the petitioner's counsel to show cause why she should not be sanctioned for frivolous filing. The Oct. 21 opinion addresses her response to that order. "We refer this matter to the Florida Bar and write only to mention a few observations," the court wrote.

The first observation concerned artificial intelligence. "The response does not deny using AI but evades the issue and attempts to defend the frivolous arguments discussed in our prior opinion," the panel wrote. The lawyer told the court that she exercised independent judgment and did not delegate her duties as a lawyer to AI.

The opinion quotes her statement in full: "Every word I file is a word I have read, judged, verified against its source, and adopted as my own, with the technological competence the same opinion requires." The panel did not accept that statement as a defense. "A lawyer taking responsibility for a pleading she signed does not relieve the lawyer of responsibility for the pleading's contents," the court wrote.

The second observation concerned the false quotation. At pages 78 and 79 of her response, according to the opinion, the lawyer acknowledged that a motion to disqualify she had filed in the trial court contained a lengthy false quotation that she attributed to a Fourth District case. She described the error as "human error" from drafting under "time pressure."

The panel set that explanation against its own experience. "Until AI, and until this case, we never encountered lawyers 'hallucinating' non-existent quotations," the court wrote.

The third observation concerned an argument that the court had already called frivolous. The petition had claimed that the trial judge mocked the lawyer by mispronouncing her name. In her response, the lawyer defended that claim as supported by misspellings of her name in the unofficial rough transcript of the hearing.

The response itself acknowledged that the same rough transcript misspelled the names of nine other participants at the hearing, with 61 misspellings in all, the court wrote. The lawyer's name was misspelled nine times. The guardian ad litem's name was misspelled 24 times. The names of opposing counsel and of the respondent were also misspelled many times.

The panel read those figures together with the lawyer's insistence that she had used independent judgment and vetted every word of her filings. "Thus, counsel appears to acknowledge that she intentionally brought a false claim that she was mocked based upon the obvious typographical errors in an unofficial transcript," the court wrote.

The panel identified one more contested assertion. "Counsel also insists, contrary to the transcript, that the judge prevented her from moving to disqualify during the hearing," the opinion states.

The opinion closes with the judges' view of the lawyer's defense of her own conduct. "That counsel believes her practice in this case is acceptable raises many issues that the Florida Bar should consider," the panel wrote, before its one-line disposition: "Matter referred to the Florida Bar."

The opinion does not specify a sanction or recommend one to the bar. It describes the issues for the bar's consideration only in the general terms quoted above, and it does not say whether the court took any separate action on the motion to disqualify or on the trial-court proceedings.

The petitioner was represented by Jaclyn R. Soroka of Betras Kopp, LLC, of Lakewood Ranch, according to the opinion's caption. The respondent made no appearance.

The opinion is marked not final until disposition of timely-filed motion for rehearing. The referral itself places the matter before the Florida Bar.