Imagine an AI legal assistant, tasked with drafting a memo, confidently citing a series of compelling but entirely non-existent legal precedents. This scenario is not science fiction; it is a manifestation of "LLM hallucination," a persistent challenge in artificial intelligence that poses significant risks to the legal profession. For lawyers, whose credibility rests on precision and verifiable facts, understanding the roots of this phenomenon is no longer an academic exercise but a professional necessity. OpenAI recently released a new research paper " Why LanguageModels Hallucinate " which argues that language models hallucinate because standard training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty. An LLM hallucination is a plausible but false statement generated by an AI model (p. 1). These are not random glitches but confident, well-articulated falsehoods, such as providing an incorrect dissertation title or inventing a birth date f...