A source that reads like a real one and is not

A pattern, not an incident

One nonexistent citation could be dismissed as an unlucky mistake. A running count changes the story. A database maintained outside any single firm or court has tracked over a thousand documented instances of fabricated legal citations, rising from roughly two hundred a year earlier to several new ones logged most days. Courts have imposed six figures in sanctions in a single quarter for this exact failure.

That scale is the point. A tool built to catch this cannot treat a single instance as a novelty. It has to check for the pattern by default, on any filing, the same way a proofreader checks spelling without being asked.

A missing case and a mistyped one are not the same failure

Failures here do not all look the same underneath. A citation nobody can find after a reasonable search is one problem. A docket number typed wrong, or a case cited under its short name, is another, and it happens to be recoverable. Treating a typo like a fabrication is a failure of its own, one that erodes trust just as fast as missing a real one. So the ledger shows its work instead of handing over a bare verdict. What got tried. What came back. Whether something close turned up under a slightly different name.

When a court has already ruled that a citation does not exist, that ruling becomes the strongest possible anchor for the verdict. When only an automated search comes back empty, Merlise reports a lower confidence and asks for a person to look.

The evidence ledger

The same claim by claim view the product shows on a live document, built from this case.

How it resolves

The resolving record