arXiv cs.CLPaperClaude Watch
Cited but Not Consulted: A Counterfactual Audit of Legal Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness
This is a high-signal indictment of legal reasoning in LLMs: they cite authorities without actually reasoning from them, which is catastrophic for legal applications. The paper tests seven open-weight models across four benchmarks and finds the gap is robust and not closed by scale. For builders: if you're deploying LLMs in legal contexts, this is a red flag requiring intervention—retrieval-augmented approaches, human-in-the-loop, or simpler models with narrower claims. For enterprises using Claude or similar on legal work, audit this behavior immediately.