Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about CiteCheck.
What does CiteCheck do?
CiteCheck is AI malpractice risk reduction software for litigators. Every brief runs through three independent checks: Citation Verification (does each case exist and is the cite accurate?), Proposition Check (does the case actually support what the brief cites it for?), and Brief Quality Analysis (bad reasoning, factual gaps, missing facts). The result is a three-section report you can review before filing.
How is this different from a citation checker?
A citation checker confirms the case exists. CiteCheck also reads the holding and tells you whether the case actually stands for the proposition you cited it for. A real case used for the wrong proposition still earns Rule 11 sanctions — that's the "Marbury cited for warrantless searches" failure mode, and our Proposition Check is the layer that catches it. Citation checkers will rubber-stamp those briefs.
Is my document stored after analysis?
We don’t retain your uploaded brief — only the citation findings — and you can delete any report at any time. Retention is opt-in, never the default. CiteCheck runs on the Anthropic API, which does not train its models on customer data. Case lookups go to CourtListener, which receives a case name and reporter — never your brief text. Uploads are encrypted in transit via TLS.
What file formats are supported?
CiteCheck accepts PDF and DOCX files up to 10 MB. Scanned/image-based PDFs are supported via OCR.
Do you redact my brief before analyzing it?
Partly, and we're precise about which parts. Before analysis we strip contact details and identifiers — email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, street addresses, docket numbers — plus explicit privilege markers, because no citation finding depends on them. We deliberately do NOT strip party or case names. Who sued whom is the subject of a citation check, it's already on the public docket, and removing it makes the analysis worse without making you safer. We used to claim the AI never sees your confidential material; pattern matching can't guarantee that, so we don't say it. What we can guarantee is deletion: your brief is destroyed when the work is done, and that's the protection doing the real work.
How are citations verified?
Citations are checked against CourtListener (Free Law Project), which is where we get both the opinion lookup and the full text we read the holding from. We do not use a web search engine to decide whether a case exists — on a fabricated citation, a search engine will happily surface blog posts and AI-written summaries discussing the fake case, which is worse than no answer. If CourtListener does not index a case, we say so plainly: the report reads No Coverage, which means we could not check it — not that the case is bad. That distinction matters, and we never blur it.
What does the Proposition Check verdict mean?
For each citation the Proposition Check reads the actual case holding and compares it to the proposition your brief uses the case for. You'll get one of four verdicts: Supports (the case clearly stands for the proposition), Partial (close but not exact), Does Not Support (the case is about something else entirely — review immediately), or Cannot Determine (we don't have enough of the holding text yet). Every verdict includes the model's reasoning and a quoted excerpt from the case so you can verify the call yourself.
What does it cost?
Briefs are quoted individually, based on citation count and your deadline. Submit a brief and we come back with a price before any work starts. Pricing is per citation rather than per page, because a forty-page brief with eight citations is a different job than a twelve-page brief with fifty.