A legal assistant uses a self-check prompt asking the model to list any statutes cited that were not in the source packet. What technique is applied?

Legal drafts are vulnerable to invented citations. A self-check prompt that asks the model to list any statutes cited that were not in the source packet applies self-verification prompting: the model is instructed to audit its own outputs for unsupported references before staff rely on them. Catching packet-absent cites reduces the risk that city legal assistants propagate hallucinated law into memos or filings.

Self-consistency prompting to catch invented citations in city legal drafts misses the point because the prompt asks for a single audit listing statutes absent from the packet, not generating multiple outputs and selecting the most consistent answer. Self-reflection prompting to catch invented citations in city legal drafts is not what the prompt does; it asks the model to verify cited statutes against the source packet, not to broadly reflect on its reasoning process or performance. Self-correction prompting to catch invented citations in city legal drafts is a different mechanism; the prompt only asks the model to list statutes not found in the packet, not to revise or rewrite the draft to fix the flagged cites.

Exam caveat: self-verification can miss errors or falsely clear bad cites. Treat the technique as a second pass that still requires attorney confirmation against primary sources, not as closed-loop legal accuracy.

Operational check: after drafting, run the self-check listing cites absent from the packet; remove or replace every flagged cite; require counsel to verify remaining citations in the official code or reporter before the document advances.