I spent 40% of my development time preventing an LLM from citing sources wrong. here are the 7 failure modes I found

I built an AI research assistant for a German law firm and the retrieval pipeline took maybe 30% of the total development time. The other 70% was fighting the LLM to cite sources correctly. Lawyers have a very specific standard for citation. You don't say "according to legal guidelines." You say "pursuant to Article 32(1)(a) DSGVO as interpreted by the EuGH in C-300/21." If the system can't do that it's useless because no lawyer is going to trust an answer they can't verify. Here's every citation failure mode I encountered and how I dealt with each: Failure 1: Vague category citations.