A new online service called CiteProof is designed to catch fabricated case citations and misquoted court opinions in legal briefs, a problem that has grown as lawyers increasingly rely on generative AI for drafting. The Register reports that the tool performs deterministic searches of public court records rather than using another AI model, on the principle that "you cannot reliably catch AI hallucinations with more AI guesswork."
CiteProof offers a limited free tier for individual citation checks, with paid options ranging from $49 for a single brief to $499 per month for law firms needing up to 200 reviews. The company says only citation strings leave its servers, for lookup via CourtListener, and that nothing is stored or sent to an LLM.
The service responds to a well-documented pattern of AI errors in legal filings, including a Georgia court decision vacated last year over fictional citations and an Anthropic legal filing that contained Claude-formatted references to improper records. CiteProof does not evaluate legal arguments; it only verifies that cited sources exist and are quoted correctly, acting as a guardrail for lawyers who continue to use AI for drafting. The Register notes the tool is "better than nothing," though it does not come cheap.
As the only source, The Register provides the details above; no independent verification or contrasting reporting is included in the source material. The article frames CiteProof as a practical, non-AI safety net rather than a solution to the underlying incentives that lead lawyers to submit unchecked AI-generated work.
[Compute & Hardware]