# Legal Citation Certification Before Filing

> RankShield Legal resolves every cited authority against live case-law and issues a verifiable certificate before you sign: existence, quotation, and good law.

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# Certify every citation before you file.
**Citation certification resolves every cited authority against live case-law before a filing is signed** — confirming the case exists, the quotation matches the published opinion, and the authority is still good law — then issues a post-quantum-signed certificate sealed to a tamper-evident log that anyone can verify independently.
[Try the citation checker](https://rankshieldlegal.com/ai-legal-citation-checker/) [Request early access](https://rankshieldlegal.com/contact/)

A fabricated citation is not a formatting error; it is a Rule 11 problem waiting for a show-cause order. Certification moves the catch to before your signature, and it produces something a flag never does: a durable, independently checkable record of exactly what was verified.

## What does citation certification check?
Every authority in your filing is resolved on three dimensions. **Existence**: the citation is matched exactly against live case-law, so a fabricated case is flagged before you sign — the primary anti-hallucination signal. **Quotation accuracy**: quoted passages are matched against the published opinion, catching misquotes and invented quotations. **Good-law standing**: overruled or superseded authority is flagged, sourced from your firm’s citator (KeyCite or Shepard’s) — we never guess good law.
A citation passes only when all three hold. The result is not a flag on a dashboard — it is a certificate: a signed, independently verifiable record of exactly what was checked and when.

## Why is a certificate different from a flag?
Most citation tools flag suspected problems and produce nothing durable. When a judge’s standing order asks what you did to verify your authorities, “our tool flagged nothing” is an assertion. A certificate is evidence: each result is signed with post-quantum cryptography and sealed to an RFC 6962 transparency log, so a court, opposing counsel, or your insurer can confirm the checks ran — without trusting us or you.

## What it does not do

- It does not promise an AI that never hallucinates — it certifies which of your citations are real, accurately quoted, and good law.
- Its resolution is only as complete as the case-law corpus it can reach; coverage is recorded with every result, never hidden.
- It certifies process and results, not whether your legal argument is correct.

Early access · Law firms
### Prove it, don't promise it
Certify every citation, attest privilege isolation, and seal each result to a log a court or client can verify. Enterprise-grade protection, firm-sized.
[Request early access →](https://rankshieldlegal.com/contact/) [hello@seoeliteagency.com](mailto:hello@seoeliteagency.com)

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## Citation Certification, answered
The questions law firms ask about citation certification, answered directly. **No forms, no sales pitch.**

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- **How does RankShield catch fabricated citations?** Each citation is resolved against live case-law using an exact match — not just the case name. A citation that does not resolve to a real opinion is flagged as fabricated and the filing is held until it is corrected, so a hallucinated case never reaches the court. Correct Bluebook formatting is never treated as evidence a case exists, because AI-fabricated citations copy perfect format.
- **Does it check whether a case is still good law?** Yes, as the third dimension of certification — sourced from your firm’s citator, such as KeyCite or Shepard’s, and recorded with the certificate. RankShield never guesses good-law standing on its own: if no citator input is available, the result is marked incomplete rather than silently passed, so you always know which dimension was verified.
- **Can a court or opposing counsel verify the certificate?** Yes. Every certificate is signed with post-quantum cryptography (ML-DSA and SLH-DSA, NIST FIPS 204/205) and sealed to an RFC 6962 tamper-evident transparency log. Anyone can check the inclusion proof independently, which turns “we checked the citations” from a claim into evidence.

Keep exploring
## Related work
[Platform AI Citation Checker The fastest way to catch a fabricated case: resolve every citation against live case-law, then certify the filing. Explore →](https://rankshieldlegal.com/ai-legal-citation-checker/)[Solutions AI Hallucinations in Filings Why AI invents citations, what courts now require, and how to catch a fabricated case before signature. Explore →](https://rankshieldlegal.com/ai-hallucination-legal-filings/)[Platform Privilege Isolation A signed attestation that privileged material stayed inside the approved boundary — bound to informed consent. Explore →](https://rankshieldlegal.com/privilege-isolation/)