New online tool will check lawyers' sloppy AI-written briefs since they can't seem to be bothered

Bogus AI-generated citations keep turning up in court documents, but lawyers could at least run those docs through this legal citation checker

For lawyers who love to use AI to write legal briefs, there's just one problem: bots hallucinate and make things up. Fortunately, a new tool, CiteProof, promises to crawl over briefs and filings for fabricated case citations and misquoted court opinions before they result in sanctions, fines, or just plain embarrassing dressing downs from a judge.

This is hardly a new problem, with lawyers relying on AI to do their work for several years with predictably horrible results. Even if GPT-4 was capable of passing a bar exam in 2023, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hallucinating case law. 

OpenAI models aren’t alone in getting lawyers in trouble, either - Claude was actually thrown under the bus by Anthropic’s own lawyers last year when defending the company from a music publishing copyright lawsuit. A declaration in the case from an Anthropic data scientist contained a pair of Claude-formatted citations that pointed to improper records, and lawyers didn’t catch it in review. The lawyers blamed Claude for the issue. 

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Stories of AI hallucinations winding up in legal briefs are everywhere nowadays, and have had serious consequences beyond professional rebukes: A Georgia court decision was even vacated last year after a court order was found to contain fictional citations.

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In short, AI and the legal world, which demands precision and accuracy, don’t always mix, so a fact checker that can do a better job than apparently absent-minded human reviewers is needed. CiteProof wants to be that fact checker. 

Free users can run individual checks through CiteProof to look for citations or statutes, while paid users can run in-depth scans that include more detailed verification reports, quotation checking, bulk scanning, and the like. 

CiteProof admitted that, as a small operation, some vibe-coding was involved in the creation of the platform, but no AI is involved in checking legal briefs for AI. 

“You cannot reliably catch AI hallucinations with more AI guesswork,” a CiteProof spokesperson told us. “This is the foundational principle of CiteProof.”

There aren’t any LLMs or probabilistic models under CiteProof’s hood, we’re told, with queries instead relying on direct, deterministic searches of public court records to look for evidence that what AI is citing for lawyers isn’t being completely made up. 

It’s not going to tell you whether you’re making a good argument, mind you - CiteProof is just going to free up that legal assistant to do something more productive than checking citations.

The only thing that leaves CiteProof’s servers, the company claims, is strings extracted from citations that can be input into CourtListener to figure out if they’re real. Everything runs in the US, and nothing is stored or transmitted to an LLM at any point, CiteProof says. 

But why encourage lawyers to use more AI if it’s not a reliable tool for their purposes? The genie is already out of the bottle, CiteProof says, even if it is a real messy genie who just makes stuff up. 

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“Lawyers and associates are already using AI to speed up research and drafting, and that adoption isn't stopping,” the representative told us. “CiteProof isn't encouraging blind AI adoption—it acts as an objective, non-AI guardrail to ensure that if someone uses generative tools to draft, fabricated citations are caught before hitting a court docket.” 

It’s better than nothing, even if it doesn’t come cheap: A single brief costs $49 to check if you don’t opt for the limited free tier, with bundles offering multiple briefs at a discount ($199 for a five-pack), all the way up to $499 a month for 200 brief reviews for law firms that just can’t stop relying on AI to make their arguments for them. ®