Found, not found, not checked: what a citation check should tell you

A citation check that only answers yes or no is hiding something. Between "this case is real" and "this case is invented" sits a third answer that matters just as much: we could not check.

This is a walk through the answers a citation check can honestly give, and what each one should make you do. It is written for anyone who has pasted AI output into a draft and wondered what to trust.

Three answers, and why the third one matters

Take the free citation checker we built as the example. It gives one of three answers for each citation it finds.

Found. It means the citation matched a decision in the case-law database we checked for that jurisdiction, and we link you to it so you can read it yourself.

Not found. It means the citation did not match anything in the case-law database we checked. That is a strong signal to look closely, and it is not by itself proof that the case does not exist. A citation can be mistyped, unreported, or from a court the database does not cover.

Not checked. The case-law database was temporarily unavailable when we asked it, so we did not get an answer. That says nothing about your citation either way.

The third answer is the easiest one to lose. If a check cannot reach its source and reports nothing, "nothing" reads as "fine". The principle we work to puts it bluntly: that collapse is how a fabricated case reaches a court.

What to do with each answer

• Found: open the link and read the decision. A match proves the case exists. It does not prove the case says what your draft relies on it for.
• Not found: look closely before you go any further. Check the year, the court abbreviation and the number, then search for the case another way. If you still cannot find it, do not cite it.
• Not checked: wait a few minutes and run the check again. Treat the citation as unchecked until you get a real answer.

Quotations are a separate check

A case can be real and the quotation attributed to it invented. That is harder to catch, because a bad citation gets checked when you click the link, an invented sentence in quotation marks usually does not.

So wherever the full judgment is available to us, every quotation is held against what the court actually wrote. Where it is not, the check should say so. For some courts no lawful full-text source exists, and there the honest answer is that the quotation was not checked.

"Is it still good law?" is a fourth question

A citation check answers one question: does this citation resolve to a real decision in the database we checked. Whether a case has since been overturned, distinguished, or is otherwise no longer good law is a separate question, and no tool should imply an answer it cannot back.

In Juris, a separate Citator surfaces signs a case may no longer be good law, and tells you where to confirm it.

How this looks inside Juris

Citations in Sage's answers are checked against a case-law database and linked for you to confirm. If one cannot be verified, it says so.

When you build a Table of Authorities, each citation gets one of three marks: Verified, Verify manually, or Unverified, do not cite until confirmed. It reports what it could not confirm instead of leaving it out, because a table that silently drops an authority looks cleaner and is less safe.

Try it on your own draft

Paste a paragraph, a draft, or raw output from an AI tool into the checker. It is free, there is no sign-up, and the text you paste is not kept.

Kwata Team