Comment by Vachyas

The most interesting part about this to me was how they bench/compare it, like in the example with Fable:

  "Given the same prompt, Astra for Law returned two closely matching precedents; in the litigation example, Claude Fable 5.1 returned a holding that had been reversed on appeal, while in the transactional example it reported finding no such case."

It made me wonder if a good deal of law is about finding a way to work in statements with clear precedents without your opposition noticing and then later drawing upon them in court (as settled precedents, in your favor) after the opposition (perhaps implicitly) accepted it. That would clarify a lot about why some lawyers need to spend so much time pouring over and memorizing past cases (even ones that are only tangentially related); because anything they miss could be used as a potential trojan horse by the opponent.

If this is true that must mean there are a good deal of cases settled using precedent "gotchas" where both sides knew that without the "load-bearing" precedent the outcome would've definitely been the opposite. (i.e precedents almost always trump even valid arguments)