About CitationShield
CitationShield exists because the legal profession quietly walked into a tooling crisis. Generative AI is now embedded in research, drafting, summarization, and discovery — and the failure mode is hallucinated citations that do not exist in any reporter. Courts have responded with sanctions. Malpractice carriers have started asking pointed questions. Bar associations have issued guidance. And the underlying tool — the AI in the lawyer's workflow — is not going to be removed. It's going to spread.
We built CitationShield as the verification layer that sits between AI-assisted drafting and the courthouse door. Upload a brief, get a color-coded report, ship a clean filing.
What we are
A small, focused legal-tech company. We do one thing: verify legal citations against authoritative sources before your filing leaves the firm. We do not draft briefs, ghost- write, summarize cases, or replace any part of an attorney's professional judgment.
What we are not
- Not a substitute for attorney review. A green checkmark means the citation maps to a real case in CourtListener. It does not mean the case stands for the proposition you cited it for. That is your job and we cannot do it for you.
- Not legal advice. We are a verification tool. We do not provide counsel.
- Not a Westlaw / Lexis replacement. Different category. We catch the one bad cite buried among 80 good ones — we do not do primary research.
How we handle your firm's data
Briefs uploaded for verification are processed in-memory and deleted by default within minutes of the run completing. If you opt into "save reports," only the structured verdict report is retained — never the original brief — encrypted at rest with AES-256. We never use customer briefs for model training. We never share customer data with third parties. SOC 2 Type 2 audit is in progress; full compliance documentation available on Enterprise.
Founding team
Chris Swofford (operations), Marlin Swofford (go-to-market), and a small engineering team. Reach the team at hello@citationshield.com.