Why Citation Safe exists.

I built Citation Safe after watching the same story repeat itself in court records, filing after filing: a lawyer asks an AI tool for a citation, the tool produces one that reads perfectly, and nobody checks it before it goes in front of a judge. Then a court cannot find the case. The most-cited example, Mata v. Avianca, 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), ended with a $5,000 Rule 11 sanction and a dismissed claim, and it was nowhere near the last one — our own public sanctions database, built from Damien Charlotin’s independently maintained dataset, tracks a growing, publicly reported pattern of outcomes ranging from formal warnings to five-figure sanctions and dismissed claims. That struck me as a fixable, mechanical problem, not an unsolvable one: a citation either exists in the source it claims to, or it doesn’t. A quote either appears in the text, or it doesn’t. Those are lookups, not judgment calls, and a lookup is something software can do reliably, every time, before a filing goes out instead of after a court catches it.

That is the whole premise behind Citation Safe: verification-first, not confidence-first. Every result names the exact source we checked and the exact moment we checked it. We built the product around a three-layer model — existence, quote match, and proposition support — precisely so that the two layers we can make fully deterministic (existence and quote match) never get blurred together with the one layer that is necessarily judgment-assisted (proposition support). We say “VERIFIED” only when we mean it, we say “UNCONFIRMED” when we don’t have a confident answer instead of quietly rounding up, and we never phrase an LLM-assisted read as a substitute for a lawyer actually reading the source. The full contract is at /methodology, and the live, measured error rate behind it is published, not asserted, at /quality.

Citation Safe is built and operated by Digital Empire Holdings LLC, a Wyoming company headquartered at 30 N Gould St Ste N, Sheridan, WY 82801. I’m the sole founder. There is no team-of-experts roster on this page, because there is no team of legal experts behind this product — and inventing one would be exactly the kind of fabrication this product exists to catch in other people’s work. I am not a lawyer, and Citation Safe is not legal advice; it is a verification tool built by someone who thought the underlying problem was mechanical enough to solve in software, and who is personally accountable for every line of the methodology, the coverage map, and the verdict language described on this site.

That accountability has a concrete backstop: if a paid check stamps a citation VERIFIED and a re-check against the same authoritative source confirms that was wrong, the fee for that specific verification is refunded automatically — no negotiation, no support ticket, logged to our own public error rate. The full terms are at /refund. We built that guarantee because a verification product that isn’t willing to pay for its own mistakes isn’t serious about the problem it claims to solve.

— Andy Gaber, Founder