The Push into Legal Services
Companies are selling AI to lawyers faster than courts can fine them for using it.
So far this year, three of the four major AI labs have either launched or pitched products aimed at lawyers. Google put Gemini Enterprise for Legal into preview in late August with four of the world's biggest firms, three months after Anthropic released what is now known as Claude Legal Solutions. Elon Musk is also interested, with his SpaceXAI lab having thrown up a dedicated legal solutions page on its website.
Together, it marks a push into legal services that has intensified even as lawyers continue to be fined and vilified for submitting AI filings packed with fictitious case law. In June, the Ontario Law Society Tribunal ordered lawyer Shahryar Mazaheri to pay tens of thousands of dollars for using filings drafted using Grok, which contained fake case citations. Researcher Damien Charlotin's database has cataloged nearly 2,000 such cases worldwide, involving more than 800 lawyers and 1,100 self-represented litigants.
AI Failures in Courtrooms
The Ontario Law Society found last December that Mazaheri had used an earlier version of Grok to draft a factum for a client's appeal. This, tribunal documents say, produced fabricated citations and invented legal principles. A costs decision issued back in June ordered Mazaheri to pay $31,150, with the adjudicators noting that an LLM does not appreciate nuance or exercise judgment, and is strongly predisposed to giving an answer rather than admitting ignorance.
Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the highest-grossing law firms in the United States, is among the guilty. It filed an emergency letter with the Southern District of New York in April after a bankruptcy motion submitted to Chief Judge Martin Glenn was found to contain 42 AI-generated fabrications. In Canadian courts alone, reported cases involving fabricated citations rose from just seven in 2024 to 86 in 2025, with 39 more in the first quarter of 2026.
Before any major AI company had released a specific legal tool, DoNotPay dropped plans in early 2023 to have an AI robot lawyer argue a case in court after state bar associations threatened criminal prosecution.
Tools Built for Verification
Google and Anthropic both imply that their legal products are built for verification. Google's product routes queries via connectors to external legal databases such as Everlaw and NetDocuments, rather than relying on the model's training data in isolation. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said at launch that ensuring every aspect of these agentic workflows is accurate, factual, and grounded in legal authority is of critical importance.
Anthropic has taken a similar approach with its Claude Legal Solutions product, including a reported 20 connectors to legal platforms alongside 12 pre-built plugins. The lab has claimed a high score on the BigLaw Bench legal reasoning benchmark. The key difference between these products and earlier incidents is that rather than asking the model to generate citations from memory, it pulls them from external, verified sources.
SpaceXAI's Grok-powered legal product, meanwhile, has thinner credentials. A Cursor blog post stated that Grok 4.5 was suited for finance and legal work, but SpaceXAI's later announcement focused on coding and knowledge work without mentioning specific legal applications. SpaceX officially acquired Cursor for $60 billion, bringing the code editor's legal marketing under the Grok umbrella.
The Ongoing Duty of Lawyers
In a 2024 study, Stanford's RegLab found hallucination rates of 17 percent and 33 percent after testing purpose-built legal AI platforms from LexisNexis and Westlaw. There hasn't yet been a comparable independent audit looking at Google or Anthropic's newer legal tools.
All attorneys are subject to bar association rules that place a duty to verify citations on the attorney who files them, whether AI was used or not. Penalties are imposed because output is not thoroughly checked, an obligation that remains unchanged regardless of vendor safeguards.
