Citations and AI

How to check AI-generated legal citations before you file

October 21, 2026 · By DraftAria team · 8 min read

AI drafting tools can write a persuasive paragraph in seconds, and they can also cite a case that doesn’t exist, quote words the court never wrote or attribute a holding to the wrong decision. The citation looks just as polished either way. Here is why that happens and a practical checklist for checking every authority in an AI-assisted draft before it goes to the court.

Not legal advice

This article describes general practice. Your court’s local rules, your judge’s standing orders and your professional-conduct rules decide what you must do. When in doubt, check them.

Why AI tools get citations wrong

A general-purpose language model writes by predicting likely text. It has seen a great many citations, so it knows what one looks like: a case name, a volume, a reporter, a page, a court and a year. Unless the tool actually looks the authority up in a reliable source, nothing in that process checks that the combination is real. Tools that search the web or a case-law database make mistakes less often, but they can still misread a source, cite the wrong page or overstate what a case holds.

The errors fall into a few patterns:

Invented cases. A plausible case name with a plausible citation, for an opinion that was never issued.
Real case, wrong citation. The case exists, but the volume, page, court or year is wrong, so the cite leads somewhere else or nowhere.
Real citation, wrong case. The volume and page belong to a different, unrelated opinion.
Invented or altered quotations. A quotation that reads like the court but doesn’t appear in the opinion, or appears with words changed.
Wrong proposition. The case exists and is cited correctly but doesn’t hold what the brief says, or the language comes from a dissent, a concurrence or dicta.
Bad law or the wrong court. A case that has been reversed or overruled, a statute that has been amended, or an out-of-circuit or unpublished decision presented as binding.

What is at stake

Signing a filing certifies that its legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for changing it (FRCP 11(b)(2)), and state rules have equivalents. That duty is the same whether a citation came from a research database, a colleague or an AI tool. Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing briefs with fabricated citations; one widely reported example is Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), where the court imposed sanctions after lawyers filed an opposition citing decisions, generated by ChatGPT, that did not exist.

Many individual judges and some courts now have standing orders or local rules on generative AI, for example requiring a certification that any AI-drafted text was checked by a person, or a disclosure that AI was used. The requirements vary from judge to judge, so check them in every case.

A checklist for every authority

Work through these steps for each case, statute, rule and regulation in the draft, not just the ones that look unfamiliar.

List every authority. Pull out every citation, including short forms and Id., so none is skipped. The free Citation Format Checker lists the citations in pasted text or an uploaded Word or PDF file.
Confirm the authority exists. Pull up the opinion itself from a reliable source: Westlaw, Lexis or another research service, the court’s own website, the official reporter, or a free database such as CourtListener. Check that the case name, court, year and reporter citation all match. A summary or another brief quoting the case is not enough.
Confirm the pin cite and every quotation. Go to the cited page and find the quoted words, exactly as quoted. Check any brackets, ellipses and added emphasis, and that the words come from the majority opinion.
Confirm it supports the proposition. Read enough of the opinion to know what it actually held: the issue, the procedural posture, the standard of review and the facts. Make sure the sentence in the brief doesn’t overstate it.
Confirm it is still good law. Run every case through a citator such as KeyCite, Shepard’s or BCite, and look at its subsequent history. For statutes, rules and regulations, confirm you are citing the version in force for your issue.
Check its weight in your court. Is it binding or only persuasive where you are filing? If it is unpublished or nonprecedential, check whether and how your court allows it to be cited (in the federal courts of appeals, FRAP 32.1 and the circuit’s own rules).
Check the format. Bluebook form (or your court’s citation rules), parallel citations where required, and short forms that point to the right authority.
Check the rules on AI use. Read the local rules, the judge’s standing orders and your firm’s policy, and make any certification or disclosure they require.
Record who checked what. A short cite-check log (authority, source, who checked it, date) helps when several people work on a draft and when someone asks later.

Red flags in AI-generated citations

A case you have never heard of that holds exactly what you need, in exactly the words you need.
A reporter that doesn’t fit the court or the year, such as a district-court decision in F.3d or an F.4th citation dated before 2021, when that series began.
A quotation you can’t find when you search the opinion for a few of its words.
A case name that doesn’t match the parties on the opinion you find at that citation.
Docket numbers, judges’ names or dates that look plausible but can’t be found on the court’s own docket.

What each check does and doesn’t tell you

No single tool does the whole job. Each layer answers a different question:

Check	Tells you	Doesn’t tell you
Format check	The citation is written in a recognisable, conventional form.	Whether the case exists.
Database lookup	An opinion with that volume, reporter and page exists.	Whether it says what the brief says, or is still good law.
Reading the opinion	The pin cite, the quotation and the holding match the brief.	Whether later decisions have limited or overruled it.
Citator	The case’s later history and treatment.	Whether it is the best or binding authority for your court.

A database that can’t find a citation doesn’t prove the case is fake: no free database is complete, and a typo in the volume or page is enough to miss. Treat “not found” as “find it another way”, and treat “found” as the first step, not the last.

How DraftAria helps, and what it doesn’t do

DraftAria is built to make AI-assisted drafts easier to check, not to skip the check:

Aria is told not to invent authority. Ask Aria’s instructions tell it never to fabricate citations, case names, quotations, docket numbers, rule numbers or statutes; to say plainly when it isn’t certain an authority exists and says what it describes, and mark it [VERIFY]; and to remind you to verify authorities before relying on them or filing anything. Instructions reduce errors; they don’t guarantee there are none, which is why Ask Aria also reminds you, under the message box, to verify citations and facts before relying on them.
Placeholders instead of guesses. Generated templates are told to write [CITE AUTHORITY] where authority is needed rather than invent it, and some built-in agents list “Authorities to verify” instead of vouching for a motion’s citations.
Citation Check, one click away. Aria’s answers and agent results have a Check citations button that opens the text in Citation Check. It finds the case, statute, rule and regulation citations and flags common Bluebook format problems (a missing year or court, reporter and rule abbreviations, “vs.” for “v.”, a quotation without a pin cite, section-symbol spacing, an Id. with nothing before it), with a suggested fix for each. It doesn’t use AI, so it reports only what is in the text.
CourtListener lookup. Signed in, Citation Check can look case citations up in CourtListener’s citation lookup, run by the Free Law Project. Only the volume, reporter and page of each case citation are sent, not your document. Each one comes back as found, not found, several matches, or couldn’t be read or checked. “Found” only means the case exists: it doesn’t mean the pin cite or quotation is right, that the case supports your point or that it is still good law. Westlaw (WL) citations can’t be looked up this way.
A free format check. The Citation Format Checker runs the same format checks in your browser with no sign-up and previews a Table of Authorities. It doesn’t look cases up at all.

DraftAria does not replace a citator or reading the authorities yourself. Use it to catch format problems and citations that don’t exist, then do the rest of the checklist with your research service before you file.

Once the citations are right, build the Table of Authorities in Word.

Questions

Can I ask the AI tool to check its own citations?

Asking the same tool whether a case is real isn’t verification: it can confirm a citation it invented. Check every authority in a source that holds the actual opinion.

If a case is found in CourtListener, can I cite it?

Not on that alone. A match shows that an opinion with that citation exists. You still need to read it, confirm the pin cite and quotations, and check its later history in a citator.

Do I have to tell the court I used AI?

It depends on the court and the judge. Some standing orders and local rules require a disclosure or a certification; many say nothing. Check the rules and orders for your case, and your firm’s policy.

Sources

Occasional notes on court rules, filing requirements and how DraftAria works.