When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

Exactly. Even if you ensure the cited cases or articles are real it will misrepresent what said articles say.

Fundamentally it is just blah blah blah ing until the point comes when a citation would be likely to appear, then it blah blah blahs the citation based on the preceding text that it just made up. It plain should not be producing real citations. That it can produce real citations is deeply at odds with it being able to pretend at reasoning, for example.

Ensuring the citation is real, RAG-ing the articles in there, having AI rewrite drafts, none of these hacks do anything to address any of the underlying problems.

We have got to bring back the PE exam for software engineering.

That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

That goes some way to explaining why programmers don't have a moral compass.

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

That is why I called it a great start and not a finished product. I image there are a lot of legal cases to sift through and it is a lawyers job to at least keep track of the imporant ones (those which sets precedent), but knowing that there are multiple "lesser" rulings in your favour could be useful. And having a search enging that can find those based on a description of your current case? Not a bad idea to me.

The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

I can only agree here.