LLMs invent law that doesn't exist.

Mata v. Avianca, S.D.N.Y. 2023 — six fabricated cases. Sanctioned.

Retrieval helps — but does not bind. The model can still synthesize across true-but-irrelevant authorities.

"Just retrieve harder" addresses surface accuracy. It does not address Traceability — the property that every claim emitted maps to a specific authority you can point at on the page.

Retrieval-only PoSoT
answer ← model(prompt + top-k docs) answer ← decode(solve(encode(doctrine)))
trace = "the model said so" trace = claim → source_case → edge_chain → root_node