Terms of Service

Version v2026.07.19a · Effective July 19, 2026. Prior version: v2026.07.17c, effective July 17, 2026 (see version history).

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) form a binding agreement between you and Digital Empire Holdings LLC (“Citation Safe™,” “we,” “us”), a Wyoming limited liability company at 30 N Gould St Ste N, Sheridan, WY 82801. By accessing or using citationsafe.com or any Citation Safe™ API, connector, or add-in (the “Service”), you agree to these Terms.

1. What the Service is — and is not

Citation Safe™ is a citation-verification workflow tool. It checks whether a cited authority exists in a public source, whether quoted language appears in that source, and whether the source appears to support a stated proposition. The Service is not legal advice, is not a law firm, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Verification results are informational aids. You remain solely responsible for independently reviewing every authority before relying on or filing it. A result of “VERIFIED” is not a guarantee that a citation is correct, current, good law, or appropriate for your matter.

1b. Research tool, not advice

Citation Safe is a research verification tool. It is not legal advice, does not form an attorney-client relationship, and the user retains sole professional responsibility for filings. This applies equally to Tax Cite Safe, Med Cite Safe, and FAR Check: nothing on the Service is tax, medical, or government-contracts advice, and you retain sole professional responsibility for your return, report, filing, or matter.

1c. Protected Health Information (PHI) — Med Cite Safe

You may not upload text containing Protected Health Information (PHI) to Med Cite Safe or any other part of the Service. Med Cite Safe is not designed to receive PHI and is not a HIPAA business associate. Submit only citation text (case names, PubMed IDs, DOIs, clinical trial numbers, and the surrounding sentence needed to check them) — never patient names, medical record numbers, dates of service tied to an identifiable patient, or other identifiers regulated under HIPAA. If we discover PHI in submitted content, we will delete it and may suspend the submitting account under Section 3.

1d. Professional-conduct compliance (attorneys and other regulated professionals)

If you are an attorney, accountant, tax preparer, medical professional, government contractor, or any other regulated professional, you agree that your use of the Service will comply with all court rules, disclosure rules, and rules of professional and ethical conduct applicable to your profession in the jurisdiction where you practice. This includes, without limitation, any duty of candor to a tribunal, any duty to independently verify authorities before signing or filing a document, and any court-specific rule governing the use of citation-checking or AI-assisted tools. Nothing in the Service relieves you of those duties, and a VERIFIED result is not a substitute for the independent professional review your rules of practice require.

2. Eligibility and accounts

You represent that you are at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract. You are responsible for the security of your account credentials and for all activity under your account. You agree to provide accurate information and to keep it current.

2a. Sanctions and export compliance representation

You represent that you are not, and are not acting on behalf of, any person or entity (a) named on the U.S. Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Denied Persons or Entity List, or any other U.S. government restricted-party list, or (b) located in, or ordinarily resident in, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or any other country or region subject to comprehensive U.S. embargo. We may suspend or terminate access without notice if we reasonably believe this representation is false.

3. Acceptable use; abuse and rate limits

You agree not to (a) exceed, evade, or automate around plan usage limits; (b) probe, scan, overload, or attempt to breach the Service; (c) resell or sublicense the Service except as expressly permitted; (d) upload content you lack the right to submit; (e) use the Service for any unlawful purpose; or (f) harass, threaten, or abuse our support staff or other personnel, whether by phone, email, chat, or any other channel. We reserve the right to rate-limit, throttle, suspend, or terminate accounts, without liability, that we reasonably believe are engaged in scraping, credential sharing, bulk automated abuse, or any conduct in this section — this also protects the shared capacity of the third-party public-data sources described in Section 6.

3a. Suspension, termination, and service discontinuation

Termination for cause. We may suspend or terminate your account immediately and without refund of the current billing period if you materially breach Section 3 (including the support-harassment prohibition), Section 2a, or use the Service for an unlawful purpose. If we terminate your account for behavioral abuse of our support staff specifically (rather than security, fraud, or unlawful-use grounds), we will refund a pro-rata portion of any prepaid, unused subscription fees for the remainder of the then-current billing period.

Termination without cause; discontinuation of the Service. Either party may terminate a subscription at any time as described in Section 5. If we discontinue the Service generally, or terminate your account without cause, we will (a) provide at least thirty (30) days’ advance notice by posting on citationsafe.com and, where we have your account email, by emailing you; (b) refund, on a pro-rata basis, any prepaid subscription fees covering the period after the discontinuation or termination date; and (c) make a reasonable data-export window of at least thirty (30) days available so you can retrieve your verification history and account data before it is deleted, consistent with our data retention practices.

4. Your content

You retain all rights to documents and text you submit. You grant us a limited license to process that content solely to provide the Service. By default we store only a cryptographic hash of submitted documents plus per-citation results, not the full document text, as described in our Privacy Policy. Do not submit content you are not authorized to disclose.

4a. No training on your content

We do not use your submitted content, documents, or verification queries to train or fine-tune any machine-learning or AI model, ours or anyone else’s. Where any part of the Service (currently limited to the advisory, non-deterministic Layer 3 proposition-support check described in the Argus Standard) uses a third-party AI sub-processor, that sub-processor is contractually barred from using your content to train or fine-tune its models. See /legal/ai-disclosure for exactly which features involve AI at all — Citation Safe™’s core existence and quote-match checks (Layers 1–2) are deterministic and involve no LLM.

5. Fees, billing, and refunds

Paid plans are billed in advance through our payment processor (Stripe) at the prices shown at /pricing. Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled; you may cancel at any time and retain access through the end of the paid period. Verification guarantee: if a citation is stamped VERIFIED on a paid check and a fault-confirming re-check finds it wrong, that verification is refunded automatically via the Dispute control in your report. No committee, no appeal form. This guarantee is limited to a refund of the applicable verification fee; consequential losses remain excluded per Section 7. The /refund page is the controlling statement of this guarantee; if any other page or communication describes it differently, /refund and this Section 5 control.

5a. Fabrication Warranty

Beyond the automatic verification-fee refund in Section 5, paid Citation Safe subscriptions and paid one-off document checks carry a Fabrication Warranty: if the Service marks a citation VERIFIED and that citation is in fact fabricated — the cited case or authority does not exist — Digital Empire Holdings LLC pays you $100 on the Solo tier ($29/mo) and $200 on the Professional tier ($79/mo). Free-tier and Deterministic accounts are not eligible. One claim per account per rolling 12 months. Total Fabrication Warranty payments across all Citation Safe accounts are capped at $10,000 per calendar year; claims exceeding the cap are paid pro-rata from the following year’s budget. A claim requires our logged VERIFIED response with the citation ID within 60 days of the verification event; the warranty covers only the existence of the cited authority, not whether it supports your legal argument; and this remedy is exclusive. The Fabrication Warranty is in initial rollout — amounts and the annual cap are subject to review upon completion of 90 days of operating data. Full guardrails are published at /refund.

Vertical-specific warranties (Tax Cite Safe, Med Cite Safe, FAR Check): Tax Cite Safe, Med Cite Safe, and FAR Check are separate product lines that are not currently available for general commercial purchase. If and when a vertical launches commercially, its specific warranty (a dollar-figure Fabrication Warranty for tax citations; an Accuracy Guarantee — refund of subscription fees plus 12 months free — for FDA/FCA- adjacent content such as medical and government-contracts citations) will be published on the corresponding pricing page and cross-referenced from /refund. Until then, no vertical-specific warranty is offered or in force.

A separate, optional paid add-on — the Fabrication Warranty add-on (formerly marketed as “Sanction Shield”) — offers a higher payout cap; its terms are at /sanction-shield/terms and control over any conflicting description elsewhere. This add-on is not currently accepting payment; see /sanction-shield/terms for status.

6. Third-party sources

Existence checks rely on public data sources such as CourtListener (Free Law Project). We do not control those sources, their availability, or their accuracy, and the Service’s coverage is limited to what those sources make available. Coverage maps are published at /quality.

6a. Territorial scope

The Service is operated from the United States and is directed to users located in the United States. We make no representation that the Service, or the public data sources it relies on, are appropriate or lawfully available for use in any other jurisdiction. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative and are responsible for compliance with local law.

6b. Third-party links

The Service may contain links to third-party websites, articles, or services (for example, links from our marketing pages, blog posts, or verification reports to case-source thumbnails, docket viewers, or reference articles). We do not control and do not endorse those third-party sites, and their availability, accuracy, security, and content are the sole responsibility of their operators. Your use of any third-party site linked from the Service is at your own risk and is governed by that site’s own terms and privacy policy, not these Terms.

7. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that results are complete or accurate. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties; to the extent such law applies to you, the foregoing exclusions apply to the maximum extent permitted by law.

8. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, DIGITAL EMPIRE HOLDINGS LLC WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS OR DATA, ARISING FROM YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE. OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM OR (B) USD $100.

9. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Digital Empire Holdings LLC from claims arising out of your content, your use of the Service, or your violation of these Terms.

10. Governing law, venue, arbitration, and class action waiver

Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

Binding arbitration. Except as provided below, you and Digital Empire Holdings LLC agree to resolve any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service exclusively through final and binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, seated in Sheridan, Wyoming, before a single arbitrator (or by videoconference at the arbitrator’s discretion).

Class action and mass-arbitration waiver. Any arbitration or court proceeding will be conducted only on an individual basis, not as a class, collective, consolidated, or representative action, and the arbitrator has no authority to preside over any class or representative proceeding. If 25 or more similar arbitration demands against us are filed by the same or coordinated counsel within a short period, the parties agree the AAA’s mass-arbitration batching protocol (or an equivalent bellwether/batch process) applies rather than filing and administering every claim individually and simultaneously.

30-day opt-out. You may opt out of the arbitration and class-action-waiver provisions of this Section 10 by emailing legal@citationsafe.com within thirty (30) days of first creating your account, with the subject line “Citation Safe Arbitration Opt-Out” and your account email. An opt-out affects only this Section 10 and has no effect on the remainder of these Terms.

Exceptions and venue. Either party may bring an action in a court of competent jurisdiction, state or federal, located in Sheridan County, Wyoming, solely for (a) injunctive or equitable relief to protect intellectual property or confidentiality, or (b) small-claims-court matters within that court’s jurisdiction. You and we waive any right to a jury trial to the extent permitted by law.

11. Force majeure

Neither party is liable for any failure or delay in performance caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, pandemic, government action, subpoena or other legal process (including a DOJ or other governmental subpoena directed at either party), internet backbone failure, or the unavailability, outage, rate-limiting, or discontinuation of a third-party service or data source we rely on to provide the Service, including without limitation CourtListener/Free Law Project, Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, or Resend.

12. Changes

We may update these Terms; material changes will be posted here with a new effective date and version number, and where we have your account email, we will notify you. Continued use after changes take effect constitutes acceptance. A history of prior versions is published at /terms/history.

13. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, that provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, and the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect.

13a. No third-party beneficiaries

These Terms are for the benefit of you and Digital Empire Holdings LLC only. They do not create any rights or benefits for any third party, including any end user of your organization who is not the contracting party, or any court, court staff, or opposing counsel who reviews a document you verified using the Service.

13b. Statute of limitations — 12-month claim window

Any claim or cause of action arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms must be commenced within one (1) year after the claim or cause of action first accrues, regardless of any longer period that might otherwise apply under statute. A claim not brought within that period is permanently barred. This section is a contractual limitations period, agreed by the parties in reliance on Section 8 (Limitation of Liability) and Section 10 (Arbitration).

13c. Survival

The following provisions survive any termination or expiration of these Terms, and any cancellation of your account: Section 4 (Your content, including the no-training commitment), Section 5 (Fees and refunds, only as to accrued rights), Section 5a (Fabrication Warranty, only as to claims accrued before termination), Section 7 (Disclaimers), Section 8 (Limitation of liability), Section 9 (Indemnification), Section 10 (Governing law, arbitration, and class-action waiver), Section 13 (Severability), Section 13a (No third-party beneficiaries), Section 13b (Statute of limitations), Section 13d (Assignment), Section 14 (Entire agreement), and any other provision that by its nature should reasonably survive.

13d. Assignment

You may not assign, transfer, or delegate these Terms or any right or obligation under them, by operation of law or otherwise, without our prior written consent, and any attempted assignment without such consent is void. Digital Empire Holdings LLC may assign these Terms and all rights and obligations under them, in whole or in part, without your consent, in connection with a merger, acquisition, corporate reorganization, or sale of all or substantially all of its assets or its Citation Safe business line. On any such assignment, the notification obligations in Section 3a (service discontinuation) and Section 12 (material change) continue to apply to the assignee.

14. Entire agreement

These Terms, together with the documents they incorporate by reference (including the Privacy Policy, Refund Policy, and, where applicable, the Fabrication Warranty add-on Terms), are the entire agreement between you and Digital Empire Holdings LLC regarding the Service and supersede all prior or contemporaneous agreements, representations, and understandings, written or oral, regarding the Service.

15. Contact

Questions about these Terms: support@citationsafe.com, or Digital Empire Holdings LLC, 30 N Gould St Ste N, Sheridan, WY 82801. Arbitration opt-outs and legal notices: legal@citationsafe.com.