By 2025, “legal automation” usually means drafting, intake, and document assembly. Those tools can be useful. They do not, by themselves, verify that a citation exists or supports the proposition. Claims that automation “reduces human error by 95%” are not sourced here and are not repeated.

OWL’s message is specific: legal AI should not just answer. It should verify. Run the five checks on a cite before it goes into a 2025 filing. Existence, format, holding support, verification path, human review flag.

Automation that cannot fail loudly — citation not found, ambiguous citation, source unavailable — will fail silently instead. That is the opposite of a verification layer.