The legal-AI market is moving fast. New products ship weekly, model capabilities are doubling every six months, and law firms are under pressure to adopt AI tools before their competitors do. This piece proposes a baseline standard for legal-AI products: citation faithfulness.
If the legal profession adopts this standard — and if vendors adopt it voluntarily or are required to adopt it through bar association guidance — the market will sort itself out. Products that meet the standard will become trusted infrastructure. Products that don't will reveal themselves through failed bar complaints or malpractice claims.
What citation faithfulness is
A legal-AI response is citation-faithful when, for every substantive claim, the system exposes:
The exact authority being relied on (statute section, case caption, court rule, regulation citation).
