Lawyers have been sanctioned for filing submissions containing cases that did not exist. That is not an argument against AI in legal research — it is an argument against a specific architecture, and the correct one makes a non-resolving citation structurally unable to reach a user.
A language model asked a legal question with no retrieval layer generates text that resembles a correct answer. Case citations have a strong, learnable format, so the model produces well-formed citations — to cases that do not exist. This is not a bug in the model. It is the model doing exactly what it was built to do, applied to a task it was never suited to.
The fix is architectural rather than a matter of better prompting or a better model. The system retrieves from an actual corpus of authority, generates only from retrieved passages, and validates before returning that every citation in the output corresponds to a document that was actually retrieved. A citation that does not resolve does not leave the system.
Built that way, the failure mode changes from a confident fabrication to an admission that nothing relevant was found — which is a safe failure a lawyer can work with, and the only acceptable one in this setting.
from a lawyer
from your authority corpus
precision over recall
from retrieved passages only
every one must resolve
say so, do not invent
What it is not is a research substitute. Every proposition a lawyer relies on gets checked at source, exactly as it would if a trainee had produced it. The system makes finding the source faster; it does not remove the obligation to read it.
A citation to a case that does not exist is structurally prevented in the output path: generation happens only over retrieved passages, and a validation step rejects any output containing a citation that does not resolve to a retrieved document. That is a structural control rather than a probabilistic improvement. It does not stop a real case being cited for a proposition it does not support, which is the more common failure now and why the span is shown for the lawyer to read at source.
No. It needs a corpus, and for published authority that generally means a licensed source, indexed subject to the licence terms of that source. What it adds is your internal material, which no external provider has, and a retrieval interface over both.
The corpus carries currency metadata and the system surfaces it, but the treatment status of a case is a question for a proper citator. We would rather integrate one than approximate it, because being subtly wrong about whether a case is still good law is worse than not answering.
The sanctioned filings were a grounding failure, and a verification failure too. The correct architecture is not harder to build.
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