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qingcharlestoday at 6:07 AM3 repliesview on HN

I've used general purpose LLM AI (e.g. run-of-the-mill Claude, GPT etc) heavily to draft legal documents. The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever. You can get really comfortable after checking its output a few times and getting no false citations, and then BAM, it'll put three in the next motion it writes.

Any lawyer who isn't using LLMs for research is behind the curve, though. They are unbelievable at finding niche cases you would never have found on your own. Previously it was a lot of exact search term matching, which is inherently useless for a lot of legal research. I need something that can search on vaguer terms, which AI can do incredibly well. Just check the results. I'm sure the LLMs from Lexis Nexis/Westlaw are probably better than the general purpose ones.

LLMs make fantastic paralegals. If you're doing any legal work, you should be using it, even if it's just to shoot ideas at. Have it play devil's advocate. My friend always has it play the other party's lawyer to see what all the counter-arguments are going to be.

Just like you would with software development. If you care about what you are creating, CHECK THE OUTPUT.


Replies

em500today at 6:51 AM

> The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever.

Naive question from an outsider: aren't there searchable databases of cases (with complete text) so that citations could be checked automatically, either by the same or an independent agent?

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BartjeDtoday at 7:11 AM

A legal professional can be personally liable for not checking the most recent case-law.

The knowledge cut off gap means they don't know about the most recent case-law.

I've seent his happen multiple times now. Professionals drafting letters and missing recent case-law which handles their exact case. It's unreliable.So it can save you some work; but it can't save you all of the work. And in some cases its mistakes really force you to redo all the work, and more, to be thorough and have confidence in the result.

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eunostoday at 7:15 AM

Seems companies like Thomson Reuters or other legal services have incentive to build LLM with RAG over legal cases texts and robust hallucinations detection on reference