17Auditing a Complete Legal Document

A draft passes its spellcheck. Every citation has italics. Yet one source does not support the sentence, two quotations changed words, and an id. now follows the wrong authority. A citation audit must inspect evidence, context, and format separately.

Create a source inventory; test proposition support; review quotations and pinpoints; audit full and short citations; check receiving-document instructions; and verify automated output without overstating its reliability.

Source review asks whether the authority exists and whether the inspected document is the one cited. Proposition review asks whether its passage supports the sentence, with the right speaker, status, scope, and version. Citation review asks whether the identifying fields and conventions are correct. Receiving-rule review asks whether the actual destination has different requirements.

Do not combine those statuses into an unexplained “verified.” A source may be identity checked but substantively unresolved. A citation may be formatting checked while a historical version remains missing. Labeling the status helps a reviewer direct attention to the real gap.

Draft sentence: The Brown opinion concludes that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954).

The sentence reports an inspected historical conclusion. It does not claim a comprehensive current-law survey or court-specific filing compliance.

List every real source used, its source type, full citation, access route, version, relied-on locations, and sentence/proposition. Identify duplicates so one authority appearing under several short names is not accidentally treated as several works. Keep fictional teaching sources conspicuously separate.

Save the source information needed to reproduce the check. For an opinion, record the opinion type and relevant page/paragraph context. For a statute, preserve title/code/provision/version. For record material, preserve document identity and required page mapping. For a web item, preserve title/date/version and direct URL.

An inventory is not permission to redistribute every source. Rights and confidentiality determine what copies belong in a review package. This project includes permitted Indigo snapshots and public official source records; it does not include a bulk Bluebook text extraction.

Underline the factual or legal proposition and compare it with the actual passage. Does the source state the claim, support an inference, provide an analogy, oppose it, or merely provide background? Choose the signal accordingly. Narrow an overbroad sentence rather than using a stronger signal to disguise the gap.

Check attribution. “The court held” differs from “the claimant argued.” Check temporal scope. “The 2024 Code lists” differs from “current law requires.” Check procedural scope. An assumed fact on a motion is not necessarily a trial finding. Check whether the pinpoint contains the material rather than merely the source's opening page.

For quotations, compare every word and punctuation mark against the inspected version. Review brackets, ellipses, capitalization changes, emphasis, and omission disclosures. A software comparison can flag differences; the substantive check must still determine whether a disclosed alteration preserves meaning. Check both the quote and the surrounding sentence's interpretation.

Verify case names and reporter series, court/year information, statutory subdivisions, institutional authors, editions, and publication dates. Check full citations before short forms. Then review every id. in the final reading order. Paragraph movement and inserted authorities can break references that were previously correct.

Review source-specific eligibility for supra. Make sure a book short title distinguishes works by the same author. Confirm every index and chapter link reaches an actual destination. An internal navigation link is a usability check; it does not validate the cited legal proposition.

Identify the court, publication, instructor, or assignment. Read its current official requirements and any incorporated manual. Check local citation forms, footnotes, neutral or parallel citations, unpublished dispositions, record locators, word limits, and document formatting where relevant. Keep the requirements distinct from house preferences.

If instructions conflict, document the texts and their applicability before choosing. A specific receiving rule can supersede the book's general baseline for that document. If the apparent conflict cannot be resolved from authorized sources, mark it for review rather than quietly choosing whichever looks familiar.

Citation generators and automated drafting systems can produce plausible nonexistent authorities, wrong series, incorrect pinpoints, fabricated quotations, and exaggerated holdings. A formatted output is a candidate citation. Identify the source independently, open it, and inspect the relevant passage. Do not cite a case merely because an automated answer supplies a confident summary.

Search engines and citation-matching services are discovery and identity tools. They can misresolve a query or select a duplicate database entry. In this project's CourtListener research, one ordinary search returned an unrelated decision; citation analysis and opinion inspection supplied the needed identification. The verification trail records the method and failures rather than pretending every query succeeded.

First resolve nonexistent or unidentified sources. Next resolve unsupported propositions and quotation problems. Then check versions and treatment. Correct citation components and short forms after those substantive repairs. Apply receiving requirements and typography last. Finish by checking the exported document, where symbols, tables, links, and page breaks can change.

Do not spend the entire review polishing commas around an invented holding. Prioritize errors that change evidence and meaning. A reviewer should be able to distinguish a publication-ready typography issue from an unresolved authority issue.

Inventory → source identity → passage/support → quotations → version/treatment → full citation → short forms → receiving requirements → typography/export. Keep each status and its evidence visible.

An audit should produce findings that another editor can act on. Give each finding a location, the observed defect, its consequence, the supporting source or instruction, and a proposed repair. Keep observations separate from unresolved questions. “Citation wrong” is too broad to guide revision. “The sentence attributes the dissent's requirement to the majority; the inspected separate opinion supplies that requirement” identifies both the problem and the evidence needed to assess it.

Fictional training example — not legal authority. A two-paragraph memorandum has four defects: a case's pinpoint replaces its first page; a declaration is described as a judicial finding; an Id. returns to an earlier source after a different authority intervenes; and an exhibit uses original pagination although the supplied fictional receiving instruction requires ECF pages. These invented defects illustrate distinct audit categories.

The case defect is a citation-construction issue. Restore the first page and retain the verified pinpoint. The declaration defect is a proposition-attribution issue. Describe the declaration's account unless a finding is actually supplied. The Id. defect is a reference-context issue. Replace it with a clear named short form. The exhibit defect is a receiving-instruction issue. Use the required supplied coordinate and verify that it locates the supporting content. Correcting one category does not automatically correct the others.

Assign meaningful statuses after each repair. Formatting checked means the citation form was compared to the applicable convention. Source checked means the cited material was inspected within the recorded scope. Substance unresolved means the assertion or legal effect still needs investigation. Record the actual method and scope of each check. A repeated automated check should be identified as a repeated check, without implying that a different source, version, or method was examined.

Automated citation resolution is useful for identities and candidate links. It can reveal a nonexistent citation or direct you to a plausible case. It cannot establish that the identified passage supports your sentence, that the opinion remains controlling, or that a local rule permits the chosen form. Inspect the resolved source and its relevant locator. A confidence score about name matching should not become a confidence score about legal correctness.

Keep a compact inventory of assertions lacking sources. Some are original argument or ordinary transitional prose and may not need authority. Others state legal rules, disputed facts, quotations, or treatment claims. Identify the category before demanding a citation mechanically. A document can contain many citations and still leave its most consequential assertion unsupported. Conversely, an audit that requests authority for every connective sentence can obscure the real support gaps.

At completion, write an honest scope note. State what sources, versions, local instructions, and outputs were checked; state which treatment or substantive questions remain unresolved. Preserve the date because verification has a time boundary. The final note helps the reader allocate attention rather than assuming that a polished document has passed every possible check. An audit is a reproducible account of actual work, not a declaration that no errors remain.

A source can support several sentences, and one sentence can depend on several sources. Record those relationships before large revisions. An edition change, a withdrawn opinion, a revised quotation, or a new receiving instruction can affect more than the citation where the change was first discovered. Searching for the source's full name alone may miss shortened names, id. references, and passages that quote it without repeating the title.

Fictional training example — not legal authority. An invented memorandum cites a code provision fully in paragraph 2, cites its subsection with Id. in paragraph 3, paraphrases it without a citation in paragraph 5, and summarizes it in a conclusion. A supplied amendment changes the exception relevant to the memorandum's time period. Updating only paragraph 2 leaves three dependent statements unexamined. The correct repair follows the proposition throughout the document and then rebuilds its citations in the final order.

Use a source-to-proposition list. Each row identifies the source and version, the relied-on passage, the document locations using it, and the narrow claim supported. When the source changes, the row gives a finite set of places to check. Include quotations and table entries as well as paragraphs. A table's short wording can conceal an overbroad rule just as readily as a sentence can.

Separate a formatting disagreement from a support defect

Two citation forms can both be recoverable while belonging to different conventions. Record that as a convention choice when the receiving instructions permit it. An invented case, an unsupported quotation, a missing material exception, or a wrong historical version is a different kind of defect. Do not treat those problems as stylistic alternatives. The reader needs to recover an actual source whose inspected passage supports the statement in context.

Classify findings by consequence. An identity failure prevents verification of the authority. A proposition failure changes what the document claims the source establishes. A version failure can apply the wrong rule to the relevant period. A pinpoint failure impairs recovery of the supporting passage. A typography failure may impair readability or compliance. The categories can overlap, but identifying the principal consequence helps determine the repair order.

Reopen the final document, not a remembered version

After repairs, conduct a final reading from beginning to end. Check the actual sequence of authorities, the scope of each citation sentence, and the placement of explanatory parentheticals. Confirm that a relocated citation still follows the proposition it supports. A citation that supported the last sentence of the old paragraph may appear to support several different claims after the paragraph is merged with another.

Inspect the exported document's contents and navigation as part of this pass. Test a selection of full-to-short references, source-note links, table destinations, and internal chapter references. For a filing, verify the actual receiving instructions that apply to that document and date. For a teaching manuscript, identify the convention and the scope of the examples without pretending there is a universal receiving court.

Close the audit with facts: sources actually read, versions checked, pinpoints inspected, instructions applied, output examined, and unresolved questions. If a claimed check was not performed, remove the claim. If a source limitation remains material, narrow the affected sentence or state the limitation where the reader needs it. This turns an audit from a polished assurance into a usable account of how the document's assertions can be checked.