I attended an interesting panel discussion at the opening day at LegalWeek 2025. The presentation was called Do My Eyes Deceive Me? GenAI Hallucinations in Legal Research Citation Tools. The presentation was put on by AALL and the panelists were all law librarians — Anna Russell from Cornell, Diana Koppang from Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, Mandy Lee from Seton Hall, and Paul Callister from the University of Missouri.
Let me say up front: law librarians are some of the most trustworthy and practical voices when it comes to evaluating how GenAI—and, for that matter, other technologies—are actually functioning for legal research. They know how to ask better questions and look at a problem from every angle — something many lawyers don’t do or are not good at.
It’s Not Just Hallucinations
Most of the legal world’s concern with GenAI tools boils down to hallucinations: fake cases cited that don’t exist. That’s a fair concern — and one that’s relatively easy to catch. If a case doesn’t exist, a quick search will tell you that.
But the panel made an important point: the bigger problem isn’t just hallucinations. It’s the very real inaccuracies that don’t always get caught.
These inaccuracies include:
• A real case being cited, but not for the legal proposition it’s supposedly supporting.
• Citations to statutes that have been repealed or significantly amended.
• Precedent being referenced in a case, when it’s actually not.
• Cases cited in a dissent as if they were in the majority opinion, when it isn’t .
These are the kinds of subtle but significant errors that even seasoned attorneys might miss, not because they’re lazy, but because they’ve been conditioned to trust the tools they use. All to often, lawyers stop at merely verifying that a case simply exists
