Cited but Not Consulted: A Counterfactual Audit of Legal Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness
Factual evidence
What the source reports
A research audit reveals open-weight LLMs unfaithfully cite legal authorities without altering underlying contract reasoning.
Inspect the evidence
- Inclusion basis
- Enterprise AI
- Publisher and source type
- arXiv cs.CL — Computation and Language · RESEARCH
- Published by source
- 9 October 2026
- Collected by OneBench
- 10 Oct 2026, 03:01 UK
Stored source excerpt
arXiv:2610.12361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly justify legal decisions by naming the statute or precedent behind a verdict, treated as evidence that…
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The factual summary is a OneBench synthesis, not a quotation or independent verification. Collection time is not publication time. Open the source for its full context; related reporting can share the same underlying announcement.
OneBench interpretation
Institutional assessment
So what
LLM legal citations may be decorative rather than causal, creating unverified reasoning risks in automated contract review and compliance systems.
Do what
Review model explainability standards with the team responsible for legal and compliance technology before deploying LLM reasoning chains.