Lawyers distrust AI tools that hallucinate case citations
15 posts across 5 communities in the last 60 days; 73% from r/legaltech.
“This sounds like a nightmare and the privacy confidentiality issues are significant. If you use a “free” version of Claude or Chat, wouldn’t you be training their models on your client’s confidential data and/or exposing confidential information?”
“Not a lawyer, but I had difficulty understanding what your actual questions were, the post was a bit of a word salad, so I asked AI to tidy it up. In case it's useful to anyone here with the actual know-how to answer, here was the response, it made the most much clearer: The…”
“I don't know for a fact in this case, but in other areas of "discrimination," I've had to deal with attorneys who focus on finding these situations, then locate a person who could legitimately sue and build a case around that. If the judgement is for the plaintiff, the lawyer…”
Several legal professionals are discussing their experiences with the new version of CoXounsel, expressing mixed opinions. Some find it disappointing compared to previous versions or alternatives like WestLaw and Eve, while others are exploring integrations with Claude for enhanced functionality. Concerns have been raised about potential marketing tactics and vendor affiliations.
SOURCES (54)
“I’m a BC RTB lawyer with no affiliation to OP as far as I know. (No idea who OP is.) I just tired this tool upon seeing this post and entered a realistic scenario. The tool found a previous RTB decision that was directly on…”
Other than NetDocuments? submitted by /u/Ok_Counter1939 [link] [comments]
“I had every intention of documenting the transition but then life happened linuxlawyering.com I keep hoping someone will start a forum or subreddit - any interest?”
“claude code vs codex as a harness - codex wins every single time - cc has the WORST compact summaries on the planet, absolutely useless - I can run codex for DAYS without even checking in vs having to manually clear and use custom recovery methods for cc - yes, like lm studio - it's just a harness for your bot to work in and open source. codex is MUCH cleaner - maybe you haven't used it recently”
“This sounds like a nightmare and the privacy confidentiality issues are significant. If you use a “free” version of Claude or Chat, wouldn’t you be training their models on your client’s confidential data and/or exposing confidential information?”
“It's...okay. Better than it was a few years ago. Still makes mistakes and doesn't answer the question on occasion. Or "misinterprets" the question in such a way that it draws on the wrong sources, despite clear instructions as to which sources to include.”
“If you can, take a look at the other systems the lawyers use and see what their UI's look like. Then copy them as much as possible. We attorneys have to learn a lot of new software and, therefore, a lot of new interfaces. So things like drop down menu locations, names, fonts, colors... I'd try matching these in your new system to other systems attorneys use.”
“What does it review against? From the indemnity example prompt on the website it just asks it to "review". That's always going to lead to inconsistent and, often, wrong answers. Is there a positions playbook/MCP connector present? Otherwise it's a fun exercise but irrelevant for a professional setting.”
“1,000% agree. Did plenty of that MSPs. Would you mind sharing use cases of those tools and what attorneys would currently get and how someone might internally replicate that? We currently have 6 practice groups and my goal is to identify low effort areas for quick automations using the Microsoft stack and integrations already built in our tools.”
“Legora etc tried to fool lawyers thinking they wouldn’t really be interested in developing their own stuff. Well they’re wrong.”
“What do you mean train CoCounsel? It’s already trained. You sure you used it correctly?”
“I use Claude Regularly and it’s trash. It fails to organize documents and does the least work possible and lies to me about the process. Anytime I use it I have to say tell me the steps you took”
“Not a lawyer, but I had difficulty understanding what your actual questions were, the post was a bit of a word salad, so I asked AI to tidy it up. In case it's useful to anyone here with the actual know-how to answer, here was the response, it made the most much clearer: The core issue is how to draft IP assignment and non-compete agreements for a bootstrapped LLC that protect the company without overly restricting the founders' existing consulting businesses or burying the IP if the ven”
“Nothing to add? Just dropping a link to a unpassed bill? Ok, I will… This bill prohibits the submission of pleadings that include hallucinated citations, instead of just existing rules requiring the practitioner to certify that to the best of their knowledge blah blah. Not really relevant to the post, which is about one more tool among many and everyone will have the same obligation regardless of the tool they choose”
“You are wildly overestimating the abilities of ChatGPT and Claude to provide correct responses to non-lawyers, who usually do not know the right questions to ask. Signed: a lawyer who constantly gets unsolicited emails from potential clients who swear up and down that they have a slam-dunk case because they didn't mention to the chatbot the obvious holes in their theory of recovery.”
“I don't know for a fact in this case, but in other areas of "discrimination," I've had to deal with attorneys who focus on finding these situations, then locate a person who could legitimately sue and build a case around that. If the judgement is for the plaintiff, the lawyer could potentially get all fees paid for by the business. So yes, it is a legitimate issue, even if there was no legitimate complaint to start with.”
“yeah the false positives are the worst part, half these tools just drown you in noise. the JS obfuscated text stuff sounds like the actual nightmare though. is that still manual for you or did you find something that handles it?”
“I hate that this is how AI is being used.. but tbh this is a nothing burger...This is exactly what a good lawyer/team does.. they argue against what their client is accused of.a good prosecutor should be able to dismantle the AI argument the same way they would a human argument. just because its AI generated doesn't mean its a corrupting of the process or cheating..the process is the same either way, its corrupt or broken the same way either way, it works the same way either way.”
“Or, better yet, use "indication(s)" like a normal human being. submitted by /u/No-Study2484 [link] [comments]”
“I'm confused when people say they use claude for stuff like this, do they mean they paste their docs i to it and start asking questions? Why not actually build guardrails around it?”
“Dude this subreddit has become a wasteland of people trying to sell these dime a dozen AI native legal tools to people. You’d be better off with Claude our of the box with skills and connecters than whatever this load of garbage is”
“Would there be any solicitor who would be willing to work with me on this project? Perhaps bring into production someone who could genuinely help with court bundle prep for their own business? I appreciate its my opinion on whether it would help”
“I'd try it. I don't think it'll replace Lexis or Westlaw though, but I think it looks like it might help with the organization of cases for a specific brief and for brief writing.”
“This is hilarious because none of those four resources (with the possible exception of Martindale) are considered actually good sources of truth for this. The fact that no LLM referenced Chambers is so, so bad.”
“Most definitely. Imagine the worst possible scenario with your AI bot advising a pregnant woman. The potential for a terrible outcome is non-zero ... You need that disclaimer to be legally bullet proof in all territories/jurisdictions around the world in which your app is available .”
“For US law I can tell you it’s garbage. Not sure about the bar exam but for general legal advice I’ve tried sol 5.6 ultra and it makes terrible mistakes. Fable is a lot better but it too needs to be carefully watched.”
“Honestly, Harvey isn't really a "better AI" than Claude. The difference is that it's built specifically for legal work, it comes with legal databases, document review workflows, citations, and firm integrations already set up. If you have Claude plus good legal database access and don't mind putting the pieces together yourself, you can get surprisingly close.”
“For those who have bought into Harvey, for a damages/valuations firm, do you think Harvey may be worth it? There are often a ton of documents in the litigation process.”
Claude is remarkably useful in this case. It can save you a lot of time.
“claude is probably better than most lawyers that are going to reach out to you on reddit my friend”
“I am an attorney leading a rollout of Claude for Enterprise. The point would not be to replace a piece of SaaS feature for feature; it would be for individuals in the firm to be able to implement narrow solutions to particular issues with agility and not pay for a number of features not needed. Having the flexibility to use general purpose tools generally is valuable, and for the cost of seat licenses to Harvey you can deploy a lot of horsepower directly. It is also valuable beyond legal roles t”
“This seems odd. It seems pretty clearly designed for legal work, has a huge library of legal prompts and playbooks and seems explicitly designed for legal workflows. (In an interview i did hear PE firms are their biggest customers which I assume is their in house legal teams.) Their marketing wasn't cagey about it at all in my experience. Curious”
“Almost all of the lawyers I know who have experience with both Claude and Legora prefer Claude.”
“In practice for close to two decades now, honestly, not once have I truly bluebooked after law-school. I practice in NY. Do you actually need this?”
“> Insert one new exhibit mid-document, and someone renumbers everything by hand at 2 a.m. before a filing deadline. lol no. I just use the next exhibit number that hasn’t been assigned. Who cares if one exhibit number is out of order.”
“Formatting was never the hard part — Claude nails Bluebook form in a couple passes. The hard part is what's underneath: that the case is real, and that the pincite actually lands on a page that supports your proposition. The Stanford study on Lexis+ AI and Westlaw's tool clocked hallucination rates around 17% and 33% even *with* RAG grounding, and the worst ones aren't fake cases. They're real cites where the pinpoint page says something else. A formatter will happily format a wr”
“Yeah, we have had several issues with the drafting. Sometimes it's too verbose, sometimes it completely ignores the instructions (for ex: including in the prompt to NOT outline the facts as bullet points, and it will do it anyway), and a few issues with it not following the templates. We've reported them to their engineering team and seen some improvements but my hope is that the new CoCounsel drafting is better so we can switch completely.”
Drafting is quite useful. Did you have issues with Eve’s drafting?
“We use a barcode system and another app to display evidence in the court room, I'm working on using Claude to build out those barcodes because the manual process is super time intensive and it's commercial litigation so the cases are document heavy.”
“fair enough, I suppose. I assure you. I don't work for them and have no vested interest in promoting them. It just happens to be what's working for my little firm at the moment.”
“I literally said in a comment the goal to replace and stop using Eve. That would be really bad ad content.”
“Just to say I'm not taking this post down, but I agree the Eve reference should be taken with a pinch of salt. One or two comments are also from accounts on here that are a little suspicious. Thank you to people for flagging it. I'll keep an eye on it.”
“Getting attorneys to actually use these tools is another battle The hardest battle. Part of why I got brought on as a legal ops director. And I'm lucky enough to have relatively young attorneys in their 40s and 50s who in general aren't averse to tech.”
“Claude can connect to co-council and your research can be conducted through either.”
“The older version and the new? The old version was effectively worthless, I'd rather just use WestLaw raw with my own search terms than the old version.”
“The main thing is the drafting capabilities. And that it only uses resources you upload, so it can't hallucinate cases. The goal is for CoCounsel to replace it because we can connect CoCounsel to other things I'm building in Claude but the current set up of CoCounsel is choking on file uploads and has too many restricted file types to be particularly useful in the document heavy cases we work.”