Align Bets on Retrieval-Only AI to Solve Legal Research Hallucination Problem

Align, a Washington, D.C.-based litigation technology company, launched Align Research on August 3, 2026, an AI-powered case retrieval tool priced at $100 per task with a free tier of three jobs per month. The product stakes a clear position in the legal AI market: it retrieves real court opinions and generates no original text, a design choice aimed squarely at the hallucination anxieties that have slowed adoption of generative AI tools in law firms.

Legal research has become one of the most contested categories in legal technology since large language models entered mainstream use in 2023. Tools from Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and a wave of startups now promise to compress hours of associate-level research into minutes. But reports of fabricated citations, including the widely covered 2023 Mata v. Avianca incident in which a lawyer submitted ChatGPT-generated case law to a federal court, created lasting reputational caution among firms and corporate legal departments. Align's founder, Sam Davidoff, a former litigation partner at Williams & Connolly, designed the product to sidestep that risk entirely by structuring it as a retrieval system rather than a generative one.