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Verification is a set of specific motions, and if you\u2019ve never been shown them, \u201cverify\u201d just means reading the thing again more suspiciously \u2014 which catches almost nothing, because the AI\u2019s output is fluent and fluency is what fools you.<\/p>\n
How Lawyers Verify AI Output: 5 Critical Checks<\/h2>\n
Here are five checks, in the order I\u2019d run them<\/a>.<\/p>\n Copy the citation. Search it two ways in Westlaw, Lexis, vLex Fastcase, or CourtListener: once by reporter cite, once by party name. A general web search is not this check \u2014 it will happily surface a blog post repeating the same fabricated cite.<\/p>\n You\u2019re sorting each citation into three bins: it doesn\u2019t exist; it exists but isn\u2019t what you were told; it exists, is what you were told, and is no longer good law. Give yourself 90 seconds. If you can\u2019t find it in a database in 90 seconds, stop treating it as real.<\/p>\n Then run the citator. A real case cited for a real proposition that was overruled four years ago would still pass every other check on this list.<\/p>\n An invented case is embarrassing but easy to catch. The more common failure is a real case, correctly cited, offered for something it does not hold. This is where the actual risk is. <\/p>\n For every proposition attributed to a case, open the opinion and find the sentence that supports it. Not the headnote \u2014 headnotes are editorial summaries, and AI output often reproduces their \u201cshape\u201d without their substance. Find the actual sentence, on the actual page, with a pinpoint you could put in a brief.<\/p>\n If you can\u2019t point to a sentence, the citation does not support the claim, however reasonable the claim sounds.<\/p>\n Treat quotation marks with particular suspicion. AI output frequently presents paraphrases within it. Verify quoted language character by character, or don\u2019t quote it.<\/strong><\/p>\n Here\u2019s a familiar hypothetical. You\u2019ve asked for authority on when the duty to preserve documents attaches, and the output hands you a case \u2014 call it Harlan v. Meridian Freight \u2014 with a reporter cite, a pinpoint, and a clean one-sentence summary.<\/p>\n Search the reporter cite. Nothing. Search the party names. You get a case with one of those names, a different opposing party, a different circuit, a different year. That mismatch is the tell: the model assembled something plausible out of real-sounding parts. <\/p>\n Ninety seconds, done.<\/p>\n Now the harder version. The cite resolves. Case, parties and year are all correct. You open it and search the opinion for \u201cpreserve.\u201d It appears twice, both times in a recitation of the parties\u2019 arguments \u2014 not in the holding, which turned on something else. The citation is real, and the proposition is not. Nothing short of opening the opinion catches that, which is why this type of failure ends up in filings.<\/p>\n Once you\u2019ve added text in an AI prompt box, your confidentiality check is over, and you\u2019ve failed it. The client confidentiality <\/a>check has to happen in the second before you hit paste.<\/p>\n The instinct is to sanitize: strip the names, round the dates, describe the situation generically. That instinct is where most well-intentioned failures happen, because the identification risk doesn\u2019t come from any single element. A matter can be identifiable from jurisdiction, posture, claim type and a date range with no names in it at all. Small bar, distinctive facts, and you\u2019ve described your client to anyone who recognizes the case.<\/p>\n So the question isn\u2019t how to de-identify. It\u2019s whether the task can be done with no client information in it at all. Plenty can: research on settled law, formatting a template carrying no case facts, and general administrative work. Anything that carries the matter can\u2019t, and no amount of rewording gets around that.<\/p>\n For the cases in between, use this one filter: <\/p>\n If your supervising attorney could see exactly what you\u2019re about to submit, would they be comfortable? Would your client?<\/strong> <\/p>\n Anything short of an unqualified yes means ask first. And if your firm or business has no written AI policy (most don\u2019t), that isn\u2019t permission; it means the conservative reading applies until you have one.<\/p>\n Pen and paper work best here. Read the output and bracket every sentence that asserts a legal conclusion. Then take the brackets one at a time.<\/p>\n For each, ask: <\/p>\n Is this authority controlling here or merely persuasive, how much weight does the contrary authority deserve, and do these facts map onto that holding or only resemble it?<\/strong><\/p>\n Write one sentence answering it \u2014 in the margin is fine.<\/p>\n If you can write the sentence, the judgment is yours, and the tool got you there faster. If you can\u2019t, the call has been made by something that cannot be asked to explain it, and your name is going on it anyway. That\u2019s the line, and it has nothing to do with how many of the words you rewrote.<\/p>\n One line per use: the tool, the task, what you checked, what you changed. Keep this log in the matter file, not in your head.<\/p>\n It takes 15 seconds, which seems like too much bureaucracy right up until someone asks how a document was produced. Then it\u2019s the difference between an answer and a reconstruction \u2014 and the person asking usually can\u2019t tell a bad memory from a bad process.<\/p>\n If you keep one check from this article, keep this question:<\/p>\n Could you explain and defend every sentence, in your own words, without referring back to the AI output?<\/strong><\/p>\n If yes, the thinking is yours, whatever tools were involved. If no, you\u2019re submitting someone else\u2019s reasoning under your name. The five checks above are the specific places that gap tends to hide.<\/p>\n Image \u00a9 iStockPhoto.com. <\/p>\n Sign up for Attorney at Work\u2019s daily practice tips newsletter here<\/a> and subscribe to our podcast<\/a>, Attorney at Work Today.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most advice about AI in legal stops at \u201cverify the output,\u201d says Samir Ali. But if you\u2019ve never been shown how, \u201cverify\u201d just means reading the thing again more suspiciously \u2014 which catches almost nothing. Here are 5 verification checks, in the order to run them. The post Five Things to Check Before You Rely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal_matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1. Pull every citation yourself, in a legal database, not a search engine.<\/strong> <\/h3>\n
2. Check the proposition, not just the existence.<\/h3>\n
3. Run the client confidentiality check before you paste in the prompt, not after. <\/h3>\n
4. Name what you did not delegate. <\/h3>\n
5. Keep an audit log and write down what you did while you\u2019re doing it.<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Biggest AI Verification Test for Lawyers<\/h2>\n
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