The Verification TaxYou still have to check each citation the AI gives you.

Here is a workflow for doing that in minutes instead of guesswork.

The symptom, as lawyers describe it

What it looks like

You get an AI-drafted citation that reads clean. That is exactly the problem.

A fabricated citation follows the right format, sometimes attached to a real case with the wrong holding, and you cannot spot it from the text alone.

The only way to know is to check it yourself, and checking by hand has no shortcuts.

Cite checking, not guesswork

What changes

Check before you draft

Drop a bad authority before it is in a brief, not after you have built an argument on it.

Does it exist?

Pull the case. If it does not resolve to a real opinion in a recognized reporter, drop it.

Is it still good law?

Search for overruled, reversed, or superseded. A real citation to dead law is worse than none.

Does it say that?

Read the passage. This is the step tools struggle with most, and the one most worth doing by hand.

Is it on point?

Real, current, correctly quoted, and still beside your argument. This one is judgment, not lookup.

Keep a record

What you checked, how, and when. Some courts now require it when AI use is disclosed.

One attorney's habit

“It's very helpful if you feed it your notes and research and ask it to organize your materials into a motion. That way, you can also easily spot the hallucinations because you did the research yourself. [...] But I carefully research whatever it comes up with.”

- A practising lawyer, on a practitioner forum

Quotes are verbatim public posts by practitioners, reproduced without attribution to the individual.

By hand, 3 to 5 minutes a citation. Thirty minutes to an hour for a ten citation memo. Ranges, not promises.

Keep going

Pick the next fix

the sanctions tracker documents what happens when this workflow gets skipped. For the full reasoning behind each step, see [the complete verification guide](/guides/verify-ai-legal-citations).