Cite-check a brief without uploading it.

Why on your machine

A draft brief is privileged work product, and where it travels has started to matter: in United States v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y., Feb. 2026) the path a draft took through an outside tool became fair ground for discovery, and protective orders increasingly name the tools a document may pass through. The tools that check a brief against a case-law database do it by uploading the brief to a server. If the draft should not leave the machine, the check has to run on the machine.

What checking offline means here

citefold reads the filing in your browser and reports what the filing says about itself. It finds every citation, ties every short form (Id., supra, a bare case name) back to the full citation it shortens, and grades what it finds: an impossible finding is a defect provable from the brief alone, such as a pinpoint cite that precedes the opinion's first page; an unresolved finding is a citation that could not be tied to an authority, reported with its text so a person can look. The impossible pinpoint, explained, walks the first kind; the guide covers everything the report shows.

The habit, in five minutes

1. Open the checker on this site, or save it once with the Download button on the front page; the SHA-256 printed beside the download identifies the file, so a saved copy can be verified.
2. Disconnect from the network if you want the proof: everything still works, because the page cannot make a request in the first place. The build refuses to emit a page that could, and the page carries a Content Security Policy under which the browser blocks every connection.
3. Drop the .docx on the panel. It is read in your browser's memory and never sent anywhere.
4. Read the verdict, the findings, and the table of authorities at the end of the report.
5. Fix the citation in Word and drop the file again; it is re-read every time.

What this method cannot tell you

Whether a cited case exists in an external database, whether it is good law, and whether it supports the proposition it is cited for: none of that can be proved from the brief alone, so citefold does not check it, and the report says so every time. Those questions need a citator, and a citator needs the final citation list, not the privileged draft. Run this check first, on the draft; run the citator on what survives.

What it costs

Free for filings citing up to 15 authorities, with no feature held back. $79 once for filings of any size; no subscription. The buy page has the rest.