Verify legal citations quickly while avoiding costly AI hallucinations
Lawyers around the globe are quickly adopting AI tools for their work, with sometimes surprising results. There are now reported cases from the UK, the USA, and other jurisdictions in which the courts have identified that case law relied on by one of the parties did not, in fact, exist and was the product of an AI-driven “hallucination”.
The UK’s High Court has summarised these in a recent judgment, R (Ayinde) v London Borough of Haringey [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), and specified that lawyers need to be cautious in their use of GenAI tools for conducting legal research. The court stated that freely accessible GenAI tools were “not capable of conducting reliable legal research” and that practitioners had to deploy authoritative sources, including recognised legislation and case law databases and the databases of reputable publishers. The lawyer has a duty to review, understand, and approve every citation.
A professional-grade generative AI tool is designed to make the risk of hallucinations minimal, and to facilitate the expert user’s verification of the sourced material — verification which is always necessary before a submission to the court. When reviewing a potential AI tool for your practice, think about how you would check its work, and whether it makes the process easier for you.
Within CoCounsel Drafting, for example, selecting the Extract Citations function generates a list of statutory references within a document and, with the aid of Westlaw, displays at a glance whether they are still in force, have amendments pending, or have been repealed or revoked. This function also works with case law; upload a draft statement of claim or defence, for example, and the tool will list the cases it cites. It will also tell the user not just whether they are still good law or have been overturned, but also whether they are unrecognised or the citation doesn’t match the names of the parties.
Do those checks fit well into your workflow? Can you see how having tools that operate in those ways will speed up your drafting and review? Those are the core questions when evaluating any new AI-powered tool: does it help you do your work in a better way.
AI technology cannot and does not remove the lawyer from the process. But it can, if used properly, allow that lawyer to quickly and comprehensively enhance their careful consideration of citations in contracts and pleadings.
Learn how you can create stronger legal documents with CoCounsel Drafting today.
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