Citation Verification Checklist
Seven steps between an AI-assisted draft and a filing. A workflow for catching fabricated or misused authority before anyone outside the firm sees it.
- Pull the list: Extract every citation in the draft into a table: cases, statutes, rules, regulations, and secondary sources.
- Confirm each authority exists: Retrieve every authority in a legal research database or from the court or official source. A search engine result or an AI tool's assurance does not count.
- Confirm it says what the draft says: Read the cited page, not only the headnote or summary.
- Confirm it is still good law: Run the citator. Look for reversal, overruling, superseding statutes, and negative treatment on the point cited.
- Confirm it fits this case: Is the authority binding or only persuasive in this court?
- Check the facts the same way: Every record cite opened and confirmed: exhibit, page, and line.
- Sign off: The verifier initials the citation table and saves it to the matter file.
- Five red flags that should make anyone stop and pull the case.
PDF. Free. A starting point, not legal advice: have the attorney responsible for ethics compliance at your firm review anything you adopt.
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Why it exists
AI tools can produce citations that look real and are not, and real citations attached to propositions the case does not support. Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing both. This checklist assumes any draft that touched an AI tool is unverified until a person has completed every step.
The rule we teach is simple. If you cannot retrieve the authority yourself in a legal research database, it comes out of the draft. Asking the AI tool whether a case is real is not verification.