How to Check Every Citation in a Brief Before Filing (Including Opposing Counsel's)

Since Mata v. Avianca in 2023, sanctions for fabricated citations have spread from a single New York courtroom to appellate benches across the country, with six-figure penalty totals in a single quarter of 2026. The underlying failure is always the same: a plausible-looking case name, a real-looking reporter cite, and no one checked. The fix is unglamorous: check every citation, every time. The question is how to do it in minutes instead of hours.

What checking actually requires

A citation can fail three different ways, and each needs its own check. The source may not exist at all (the fabrication problem). The source may exist but not say what the brief claims (the characterization problem). Or the quotation may be altered, sometimes subtly, from the original text (the misquote problem). Pulling each case on Westlaw covers the first two if you read carefully; almost nobody re-reads for the third.

A workflow that takes minutes

Casewise's Check cites does the mechanical layers in one pass: paste the text of a brief, motion, or memo, or upload the PDF or Word file, and every New York citation is extracted and validated. Case citations are checked against 5.1 million official records going back to the 1800s; statute citations are checked across twelve bodies of NY law; quoted passages are compared word for word with the source text. Each citation comes back matched, not found, or quote mismatch, with a link to the source. What software cannot do, and should not pretend to, is the characterization judgment: whether the authority supports the proposition. That remains the lawyer's reading, now focused on real cases only.

Run it on the other side's papers

The same check works on opposing counsel's filings, and that is where it gets interesting. A citation that matches nothing in the official records is either a typo or a problem, and either way it belongs in your opposition. In the AI era, checking the other side's citations is no longer paranoia; it is diligence courts have started to expect.

The document never leaves memory

Briefs are work product. Casewise processes the document in memory for the duration of the check and does not save it; nothing you check is stored on our servers or used to train anything. That is a design decision, not a settings toggle.

Check your next filing in two minutes at casewise.si: five free questions as a guest, and document checking on the 7-day free trial, no credit card.