Catch fake legal citations before courts catch you.
70%+ of lawyers now use generative AI for drafting. The hallucinated-citation sanctions are piling up. CitationShield verifies every citation in your brief against CourtListener and authoritative case-law databases — and returns a color-coded report in seconds.
Free during beta · No credit card · Cancel any time
Upload a .docx or PDF brief. Our extractor pulls every Bluebook citation — federal reporters, regional reporters, state — and verifies each one. No copy-paste, no manual lookup.
We check against CourtListener (Free Law Project) — the most comprehensive open case-law database in the country. If a case doesn't exist there, we flag it.
Green = verified. Yellow = partial match (parties match, reporter doesn't). Red = not found anywhere. One glance and you know what to fix before you file.
What the report looks like
Every citation gets a status. Green is safe to file. Yellow needs your eyes on it. Red is the one that gets you sanctioned.
Click into any flag to see what we found (or didn't), the matched case in CourtListener, and a one-line explanation. Export the whole verdict report as a PDF for your file.
- Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954)Match: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). CourtListener.
- Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 22-cv-1461 (S.D.N.Y. 2023)Match: 22-cv-01461, Southern District of New York. Sanctions order, Jun 2023.
- Smith v. Acme Corp., 712 F.3d 1099 (5th Cir. 2014)Volume 712 F.3d found, but page 1099 maps to a different case name. Verify cite.
- Jones v. United States, 999 F.4d 421 (11th Cir. 2024)F.4d does not exist. No matching case in CourtListener. Possible AI hallucination.
How it works
.docx or PDF. We never store the document after the verification run unless you toggle "save for later" — drafts are encrypted at rest and deletable any time.
A Bluebook-aware regex extractor catches the standard 80%+. A GPT-4o-mini fallback handles the gnarly ones — short cites, supra references, weird spacing.
Every extracted citation goes against CourtListener's REST API. We check case name, reporter volume + page, court, and year. Disagreement → flag.
Why this is suddenly urgent
- Sixth Circuit, 2026: Sanctioned attorneys for filing a brief with AI-fabricated citations the court could not locate in any reporter.
- SDNY (Mata v. Avianca): The case that started it. ChatGPT invented six cases. The lawyers got sanctioned and the story went national.
- 2024 ABA survey: 70%+ of lawyers reported using generative AI in some part of their practice. That number is going up, not down.
- Rule 11 + Model Rule 3.3: The duty of candor to the tribunal does not give you a pass for AI hallucinations. Courts have been very clear about this.
"Every brief I sign goes through three associates and two partners. CitationShield is a sixth set of eyes that doesn't get tired at 11pm."
"We had a near-miss with a junior associate's draft last quarter. This is what we needed."
"My malpractice carrier asked what I was doing about AI. Now I have an answer."
Quotes from beta interviews. Names withheld pending public-launch testimonial release.
Simple, per-attorney pricing
Pay for the seats you need. Cancel any time. No setup fees, no per-page charges, unlimited briefs on every tier.
- ✓Unlimited brief verifications
- ✓CourtListener-backed checks
- ✓Color-coded PDF reports
- ✓Email support
- ✓Everything in Solo
- ✓Shared firm dashboard
- ✓Audit trail per matter
- ✓Priority support
- ✓SAML SSO (Q3)
- ✓Everything in Firm
- ✓Advanced compliance reports
- ✓Custom citation rules
- ✓Dedicated CSM
- ✓On-prem option (Q4)