Nebraska Attorney Suspended for AI Use: What Your Ethical Decision Profile Reveals

# Nebraska Attorney Suspended for AI Use: What Your Ethical Decision Profile Reveals

> **Quick answer:** Nebraska attorney W. Gregory Lake faces suspension after 57 of 63 citations in a state Supreme Court brief were defective, including 20 AI-fabricated cases that never existed. Courts nationwide have issued $145,000 in AI sanctions in Q1 2026 alone. Lawrence Kohlberg's moral development research reveals your gut reaction to this story maps to one of three ethical decision stages — and stage two is where most professionals quietly live.

Nebraska attorney suspended for AI use is the headline. But the real story is what happens inside your head when you read it — because that reaction is a remarkably precise signal of where you sit on Kohlberg's moral development scale, one of psychology's most replicated frameworks for predicting professional ethical behavior.

## Nebraska Attorney Suspended for AI Use: What the Brief Contained

On April 9, 2026, the Nebraska Counsel for Discipline recommended temporary suspension of attorney W. Gregory Lake's law license after the state Supreme Court referred him for discipline. The underlying brief, filed in *Prososki v. Regan* (No. S-25-0295), contained 57 defective citations out of 63 total — a 90.5% error rate. Twenty were full hallucinations: entirely fictional cases, including *Kennedy v. Kennedy* (2019) and *Miller v. Miller*, which do not exist. Real Nebraska statutes were misquoted. When questioned at oral arguments on February 3, 2026, Lake denied using AI. The court found that claim lacked credibility, struck the brief, and his client's divorce appeal was dismissed.

This is not an isolated case. Courts have imposed at least $145,000 in AI citation sanctions in Q1 2026 alone across multiple jurisdictions. A Northwestern University study (March 2026) found 61.6% of federal judges now use AI tools themselves — yet 45.5% received zero court-provided AI training. The tool is everywhere. The verification ethic is not.