Why It Matters
RAG is how most legal research and document Q&A tools work. Because the answer is tied to retrieved sources, it is easier to cite and check, and it lets a tool answer from your own files without retraining a model. Answers are only as good as the retrieval step, so a tool that finds the wrong documents will still answer confidently.
Related Terms
- Grounding
- Tying an AI answer to specific source material, such as a statute, a case or a clause, so the reader can see where each statement came from.
- Semantic search
- Search that matches meaning rather than exact keywords, so a question in plain English can find relevant documents that use different wording.
- Embeddings
- Numeric representations of text that capture meaning, so a computer can tell that "terminate for convenience" and "end the agreement without cause" are related.
- AI hallucination
- A confident but false answer from an AI tool, such as a citation to a case that does not exist or a quote no court ever wrote.
General information, not legal advice. Part of the Legal Tech Glossary, 173 terms in plain English.