Agentic Search vs. RAG for Legal Research

Retrieval gets you passages; agents get you answers. Why multi-step, tool-using agentic search outperforms single-shot RAG on complex legal questions.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) gets you relevant passages. Agentic search gets you an answer — because it can plan, use tools, and check its own work across multiple steps.

RAG vs. agentic search

• RAG: one retrieval, one generation — fast, but shallow on complex questions
• Agentic search: multi-step planning, tool use, and self-verification
• For legal work, agentic search can chase authority, reconcile conflicts, and cite each step
• The trade-off is cost and latency — matched to the difficulty of the matter