alt Hacker News> The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever.
Naive question from an outsider: aren't there searchable databases of cases (with complete text) so that citations could be checked automatically, either by the same or an independent agent?
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It’s a band aid solution because the model can get stuck in a refutation loop, where it argues a point by pulling up a contradicting source ad infinitum. The holy grail, which has not been yet reached, is figuring out how to dynamically align the model to be consistent with all the sources in the first place (and this is a problem of provenance rather than model design)
It depends on the jurisdiction. I'm based in France and all cases here are now freely available online to people and agents [1], but it's very recent for lower courts. However, I recently had to work on Texas case law and we had to purchase access to a (very expensive [2]) database since most of it wasn't public.
[1] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/
[2] https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/westlaw/plans-and-pricin...