Cite Check for Word
One button on Word's Home ribbon that checks every case, statute, and quotation in a brief — and marks the problems on the exact words.
- Client
- A New York law firm
- Role
- Product, engineering
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- In production · private
- Live
- Private deployment
POINT I
THE DETERMINATION WAS ARBITRARY AND CAPRICIOUS
Review under CPLR 7803 (3) asks whether the determination had a rational basis. Arbitrary action is action “without sound basis in reason and is taken without regard to the facts.” Matter of Pell v Board of Educ., 34 NY2d 222, 231 (1974).
A rational determination must be sustained, Matter of Ward v City of Long Beach, 20 NY3d 1042, 1043 (2011), but the record here contains no finding at all on the question the agency was required to decide.
Cite Check3 authorities
Word dropped without an ellipsis
The brief
Why it needed to exist.
Citation errors in a filed brief are embarrassing at best and sanctionable at worst — and AI drafting has made fabricated authority a real risk. Checking by hand is slow; commercial cite-checkers are costly and opaque.
The production
What we built.
Cite Check reads a draft, finds every authority in it, and verifies each one against the research engine: that the case exists, that the name, year, and pin cite match, whether it has negative treatment or subsequent history, and whether each quotation actually appears in the opinion.
Problems land as Word comments on the exact span of text. A side pane lays the authorities out like a table of authorities, with word-level diffs for any quotation that doesn't match its source.
01Existence and identity
Checks the local corpus and citator first, then public sources. Picks the right decision when several share a first page, and warns on year mismatches.
02Treatment and history
Negative treatment and direct history from the citator; disposition read from decretal language.
03Quotation accuracy
Alignment that understands ellipses, [alterations], [sic], and star paging. Flags words dropped without an ellipsis, language quoted from a dissent, and misattributed quotes.
04Statutes and regulations
New York statutes, federal regulations (it catches rescinded parts), the NYCRR, and the U.S. Code, each checked against an official source.
05Honest failure modes
An upstream outage is reported as “not checked,” never “not found.” The optional AI support check reads only the located passage and is labeled the least reliable signal.
06Private by construction
The brief's text is never logged or stored, and only citation strings are ever looked up externally.
Under the hood
How it’s made.
- ClientOffice.js task-pane add-in with a Home-tab ribbon command
- ServiceCheck service running alongside the research engine, with queued jobs
- AccessSingle sign-on with the research engine's accounts
- InstallWord for Windows and Mac, Word on the web, or tenant-wide through Microsoft 365
Stack: Office.js · Python · OAuth 2.1 · eCFR · GovInfo · OpenLegislation