Who Checks the Citations? Benchmarking Legal Hallucination Detection
Attorneys, judges, and pro se filers increasingly use AI to draft legal documents, yet these tools frequently fabricate citations. Despite predictions that newer models would hallucinate less or that court sanctions would deter negligent filers, we found over 1,000 filings containing fabricated citations---with this number growing year-over-year. This study evaluates whether AI-based systems can mitigate these errors by automatically detecting hallucinations. We propose a taxonomy of legal citation hallucinations grounded in actual court filings and introduce a dataset of 1,300 brief excerpts containing injected errors. Benchmarking five models in agentic and non-agentic settings as well ...
| Authors | Patty Liu, Dominik Stammbach, Peter Henderson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 October 2026 |
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