The owners of Valley View Winery, 80 acres of neat rows tucked between two mountains in southern Oregon, describe their vineyard as a family affair.
Black-and-white photos in the tasting room portray the vineyard’s founder, Frank Wisnovsky, as he strolled the fields with his small children, and modern ads show the current operators, brothers Mark and Michael Wisnovsky, with Mark’s sons.
But the truth, like so many stories told after a glass or two, is messier. It involves a five-year, scorched-earth inheritance battle between four siblings, and now possibly the largest fine yet against lawyers for passing off artificial-intelligence slop as sound legal reasoning — “a notorious outlier in both degree and volume” of A.I. hallucinations, Magistrate Judge Mark D. Clarke, of the District Court of Oregon, wrote with the acidic tone of a pinot noir turned to vinegar.
With so many lawyers and litigants using chatbots to speed up their work, judges have been inundated with fictitious arguments spun out by A.I. tools. An online database tracking judges’ reprimands of A.I. misuse now catalogs more than 1,300 cases — almost triple the number from only five months ago.
The Oregon case stands out for the heft of its penalty, the heartache of its details and the ridiculousness of some of its fictitious citations — one referenced an aggravated murder case that had nothing to do with winery contracts or fee recovery.
“People often say, I can’t believe it’s family,” Mark Wisnovsky said. “I would say this could only occur in a family.”
His parents, Frank, a civil engineer, and Ann Wisnovsky, a former secretary, started Valley View in 1972, eager for a lifestyle change and a permanent home to raise their four children. Eight years later, Frank Wisnovsky died suddenly, but his wife kept it going as a legacy for their children.
The oldest brother, Robert, ran the business for a few years but moved on. Their older sister, Joanne Couvrette, never came back after college. But Mark and Michael Wisnovsky both joined their mother in the family business. She kept the books, signed the checks, owned the winery and the land beneath it. They did the day-to-day work of growing grapes and selling wine.
In 2006, Ms. Wisnovsky gave her younger sons a minority stake in the winery business. Ten years later, she signed documents agreeing to give them the rest of the business and, after she died, the vineyard land. Ownership would not be split among all four siblings as an earlier arrangement had mandated.
In 2019, the daughter, Ms. Couvrette, filed with her mother a new estate plan that called for giving the winery to her and Robert. Soon afterward, she moved Ms. Wisnovsky from Oregon to Southern California, where she lived. Then in 2021, Ms. Couvrette sued Mark and Mike on behalf of her mother’s estate, seeking $12.6 million in damages and accusing her brothers of manipulating their mother in previous estate agreements. The brothers countersued the same year, accusing Ms. Couvrette of trying to deprive them of their inheritance.
Their mother died in 2023.
Ms. Couvrette hired a lawyer in California, Steve Brigandi, who agreed to help represent her for free, since Ms. Couvrette’s daughter was dating Mr. Brigandi’s son, according to a voice mail message that Robert Wisnovsky left his brother Michael.
“We’re not spending a dollar compared to what you’re spending,” bragged Robert Wisnovsky, who was not a party in the case but urged Michael to turn over the vineyard to him and Ms. Couvrette. “Walk away. Make money and quit losing money.”
Ms. Couvrette got what she paid for; bogus, A.I.-generated citations started pouring in. Two appeared in a January 2025 filing, then seven in April and 16 more in May — even after the opposing lawyers had pointed out the previous ones.
Just before the deadline for Ms. Couvrette’s legal team to mount a defense, Mr. Brigandi was rushed to the hospital. Four months later, Mr. Brigandi’s doctor explained that he was suffering from severe kidney disease that had “significantly impaired” his cognitive function in the preceding months.
Unmoved, the judge wrote that Mr. Brigandi “must be held accountable,” adding that the court did not “give full weight” to the doctor’s declaration because of its lateness. The judge also referred to “persuasive” evidence that Ms. Couvrette herself had written the offending briefs, which were full of irrelevant citations to things like free-speech cases.
“Her A.I. software seemed to be learning about her and pulling from research she had done in another case,” said Sandra Gustitus, one of Mark and Mike Wisnovsky’s lawyers.
Maybe so. Around the same time, Ms. Couvrette was fired from her job for referring to pro-Palestinian protesters as “terrorist sympathizers” on Facebook, and then claimed she was wrongfully terminated for protected speech.
Because of Ms. Couvrette’s shared responsibility for the bogus citations, the judge permanently dismissed her case against her brothers. He also fined Mr. Brigandi almost $100,000.
Ms. Couvrette declined to comment, and Mr. Brigandi did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Timothy Murphy, an Oregon lawyer hired by Ms. Couvrette to ensure Mr. Brigandi followed local court rules, also faces more than $14,000 in fines for failing to meaningfully participate in the case. It never occurred to him that Mr. Brigandi might have stamped his own name on briefs written by Ms. Couvrette, he said, “but it seemed like that’s what was happening.”
Curtis Glaccum, Ms. Couvrette’s new lawyer, seemed to take issue with the court’s decision to punish her personally.
“If for whatever reason someone wants to be actively involved in their legal claims, it is still the attorney who is signing his name on the document and filing with the court,” he said.
Usually, the punishments for A.I. misuse are modest — a warning, a voided brief, a six-hour training with the bar. But the Valley View Winery case was “notorious,” the judge wrote, made worse by the fact that Ms. Couvrette and her lawyers were not “forthcoming, candid, or apologetic about their conduct.”
Damien Charlotin, a French lawyer who runs the A.I. legal misuse database, said he believed the monetary penalty in the case was the largest on record. It’s difficult to be sure, he said, because penalty amounts in some cases are not disclosed.
Now the winery is in the hands of the two younger brothers, who sell about 12,000 cases a year. Even before racking up almost $1 million in legal bills, they weren’t making much of a profit, just enough to pay the salaries of around eight full-time employees.
The legal wrangling may not be quite over yet: They expect their sister to appeal in as many different ways as she can.
Evan Gorelick is a New York-based writer for The Morning, the flagship daily newsletter of The Times.
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