Citation checker for court filings
citefold reads a brief on your own machine and grades every citation defect it can prove from the document alone. The filing never leaves your computer.
Free for filings citing up to 15 authorities. No account, nothing to install, works offline.
read 5 paragraphs, 3 distinct authorities
pinpoint page 12 precedes the first page of Brown v. Board of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954), which begins at 483
paragraph 2: Brown, 347 U.S. at 12
supra names a case with no earlier full citation
paragraph 4: Palsgraf, supra, at 99
result: 1 impossible, 1 unresolved
network requests; the build refuses a page that could make one
self-contained file; save it and it works offline forever
authorities checked free, with no feature held back
once, for filings of any size; no subscription
The report
Findings are graded: a defect the brief proves against itself is not the same as a citation that needs a human eye.
A defect provable from the brief alone. A pinpoint cite points inside an opinion, so it can never precede the page the opinion begins on: a brief citing Brown v. Board of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 and then Brown, 347 U.S. at 12 contradicts itself. These are the citation errors a language model produces most readily and a reader is least likely to notice.
A citation that could not be tied to an authority: an Id. with nothing before it, a short form naming a case never cited in full, a supra that two cited cases could equally claim. Each is reported with its text so a person can look, rather than being dropped silently.
Existence checking against an external case-law database is not implemented, and the report says so. Whether a citation is good law, or supports its proposition, is not checked and cannot be by this method. The tool states what it did not do rather than implying more assurance than it has.
Sixty seconds, start to finding
One HTML file, in any browser, on any machine. The checker walks through the worked example above before you commit a document of your own.
Drag a .docx straight from Word. The document is read in the browser's own memory and never leaves the machine.
Every provable defect and every citation it could not resolve, each quoted with its place in the brief, plus the table of authorities.
The guide walks through a report line by line: each kind of finding, the table, the licence, and what to do when a file is refused.
Yours to keep
The checker is one self-contained HTML file. Save it locally and it works offline forever; the build refuses to emit a page that could make a network request.
Current build: 0.1.0
Verify the download against its SHA-256 checksum:
163544ff4c018ad8f2f5a43c4c21943688e082ad38ca12becf9fc0748a3170e9
Prefer a terminal? The same engine runs as a command line: node bin/citefold.mjs check <document> reports defects, table prints the table of authorities. Both accept .docx; the command line also takes .txt, .md, and paginated .json.
One price, paid once
Free
A tool sold on trustworthiness cannot hide findings from the people evaluating it.
Licence
Why offline is the point
Every other tool that does this asks you to upload the brief.
In February 2026 a federal court held that documents a defendant drafted with a consumer AI tool were neither privileged nor work product (United States v. Heppner, S.D.N.Y.). Protective orders have since confined parties to closed AI tools (Jeffries v. Harcros Chemicals, D. Kan.; Velez v. OnePlus Technology, S.D.N.Y.). The public database of AI hallucination decisions kept by Damien Charlotin passed 1,500 entries, and courts imposed $145,000 in sanctions in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
A .docx carries no page numbers; Word assigns them at layout. The table of authorities therefore lists positions by paragraph, and a paginated .json supplies real pages. The citation grammar recognizes the shapes citations take rather than a fixed reporter list; the test fixtures exercise federal and California citations.
Questions a careful buyer asks
No. The checker runs entirely in your browser and the build mechanically refuses to emit a page that could make a network request. Disconnect from the network before dropping the document; everything still works, which is the only proof of that claim worth anything.
No. Existence checking against an external case-law database is deliberately not implemented, and the report says so. What it proves, it proves from the brief alone; what it cannot check, it names rather than implying assurance it lacks.
Everything. On filings citing up to 15 authorities, every check runs and every finding shows. The licence removes the size cap and changes nothing else.
Your key is issued against the order and sent to the order's email address. Paste it into the checker's licence field or pass it to the command line; it verifies offline against a signed statement, so there is no activation server and nothing to phone home to.
A .docx carries no page numbers; Word assigns them at layout time. The report and the table of authorities therefore point at paragraphs, and a paginated .json supplies real page numbers when you have one.
The grammar anchors on the shapes citations take: party names around v., procedural captions, volume and page digits, a year in parentheses. It deliberately carries no reporter whitelist, so an unfamiliar reporter still parses; the test fixtures exercise federal and California citations.
Yes. The key is verified against a public key compiled into the product, and newer builds keep that key, so a licence bought once verifies in every later version. Download the newest build from this page whenever you like; the checksum printed here identifies it.
Not yet. The checker reads Word documents (.docx); the command line also takes .txt, .md, and paginated .json. Save the brief as .docx from Word and drop that file. A PDF dropped on the page is refused by name, not with a cryptic error.
Longer answers, in order of use, are in the guide.