LegalDeep AI Legal Assistant
How to verify AI legal citations
By Dimitri Harding, founder · Updated
AI research tools can produce citations that look right and are wrong: a case that does not exist, a real case cited for a proposition it never stated, or an authority that has since been reversed. Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing briefs with fabricated AI-generated citations. Whatever tool produced a citation, treat it as a lead to check, not a finished result.
1. Confirm the source exists
Look up every citation in an authoritative source before doing anything else. Search by citation and by case name, and confirm the two match: the same parties, court, year, and reporter volume and page. A citation that cannot be located, or that resolves to a different case, should be set aside until it can be verified.
- Search the full citation and the case name separately.
- Confirm the court, decision date, and docket where available.
- For statutes and regulations, confirm the section number and the version in force on the relevant date.
2. Confirm it supports the proposition
A real case can still be cited for something it does not say. Open the opinion, find the passage that supports the statement, and read it in context. Distinguish the holding from dicta, a dissent, a party's argument, or the court's description of a lower-court ruling. Check every quotation word for word and record the pinpoint page.
- Is the quoted language actually in the opinion?
- Is it the court's holding, or background discussion?
- Does the pinpoint page contain the cited passage?
3. Confirm it applies to your issue
Check the jurisdiction and court level. Whether an authority is binding depends on the court that issued it and the court you are in; a decision from another jurisdiction may be persuasive at most. Compare the facts and procedural posture as well. A ruling on a motion to dismiss may not answer a question decided at summary judgment or after trial.
4. Confirm it is still good law
A case may have been reversed, overruled, limited, or distinguished, and a statute may have been amended or repealed. Use a citator such as Shepard's or KeyCite, or another reliable process for checking subsequent history and treatment. An AI-generated label like "still good law" is not a substitute for that check.
Record what you verified
Keep a short note for each authority: the proposition, the supporting passage and pinpoint, the jurisdiction, and the date you checked its subsequent history. That record makes review faster and shows which citations still need work. Citations you could not verify should be removed or flagged before the work product moves on.
How LegalDeep AI fits into this process
LegalDeep AI Legal Assistant is designed to keep sources visible: answers are structured around the authorities behind them, with source links you can open, a selected jurisdiction, and a separation between your uploaded documents and public legal sources. That makes the checks above faster to start, but it does not replace them. Verify every citation before relying on it.