How to Use AI for Legal Questions Reliably

This post details how Harvey's AI platform enhances reliability for legal questions by focusing on RAG, citation transparency, and precise question framing. It introduces the failure modes of fabricated citations, context loss, and confident-but-wrong statutory interpretation. The post emphasizes that the user (lawyer) always carries the verification burden and that Harvey's system facilitates this by surfacing sources and reasoning steps. It also outlines best practices for asking better legal questions, such as specifying jurisdiction, constraining the AI to defined documents, requesting citations, breaking down complex questions, and treating initial answers as drafts. The tiered approach for different user types (consumer, solo/small firm, enterprise) is also discussed, highlighting the increasing importance of security, privilege, and integration for enterprise users.