Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the world’s most expensive law firms, has been caught submitting hallucinated legal citations as part of a routine bankruptcy case. It’s hardly the first time an American law firm has been caught doing this; researcher Damien Charlotin has already documented over 900 instances in the US alone.
I’m bit surprised the legal profession hasn’t uniformly adopted automated checkers by now (at the very least for hallucinated case names and quotes, interpretation is obviously harder), when the reputational damage of these errors is so significant. It seems like an obvious and achievable step for a famously conservative and detail-oriented profession. In fact, the aforementioned Damien Charlotin seems to have developed such a service himself, and I’m sure competitors exist.