A solicitor was recently sanctioned for putting fabricated, AI-generated citations in front of a court. The authorities looked real. They had the right shape — a case name, a neutral citation, a proposition. They simply did not exist. That failure is the one every careful firm is now watching for, and it is the reason we built this the way we did.

The problem with a hint

Most legal AI tools will, if you ask nicely, offer citation "hints" while you research. A little flag here, a suggestion there. The trouble is that a hint is something you can skip. Under time pressure, at the end of a long draft, with the client waiting — hints get skipped. And the one you skip is the one that costs you.

We did not want a feature you could talk yourself past. We wanted a gate.

Where the check actually sits

The citation verifier does not run while you type. It runs at export — the moment before the file leaves the product. You draft your skeleton, your advice, your witness statement. Along the way the assistant has cited statute, regulation and case law. You click export, and before anything happens the verifier extracts every reference and lines it up against its real source.

For statutes and statutory instruments, that source is legislation.gov.uk. Each authority is surfaced with a direct link to the register it should match, for you to confirm. Where a citation is wrong, fabricated, or no longer the current text, the export is held at an amber-warn gate. You see the broken reference, you see the source it should have matched, and you choose: Cancel, or Export Anyway.

Either way, the decision is written to the matter ledger. So if a regulator ever asks what the firm did to stop a fabricated citation reaching the court, the answer is a record, not a shrug.

Honest about what is live today

The gate is live for UK statutes and statutory instruments now, and it warns you on hallucinated case-law citations. Full live verification of case law — checking a case name and citation against the real judgment corpus — arrives with a dedicated case-law partnership, targeted at our S2 milestone in mid-July. We would rather tell you the exact shape of what checks today than imply a completeness we have not shipped. When the case-law corpus goes live, the same gate simply reaches further; nothing about how you work changes.

Why this is a solicitor's decision, not the machine's

Notice what the verifier does not do: it does not quietly delete a suspect citation, rewrite your draft, or block the export on your behalf. It surfaces the fact, links the source, and hands you the choice. You are the one who signs the document, so you are the one who decides whether that authority holds. The tool's job is to make sure you are never deciding blind.

That is the difference between a tool with a legal skin painted on and one built by people who have felt the cold drop of realising, mid-hearing, that an authority was wrong. We built the gate we would want at our own back.

Every citation, checked against the source, before it goes out under your name.

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