Stacks Cite Check for Word
One button on Word's Home ribbon that checks a brief's cases, statutes, and quotations, and leaves a Word comment on the words themselves wherever something needs a second look.
- Client
- Lofted Technologies product, in use at a New York law firm
- Role
- Product and 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. Bd. of Educ., 34 N.Y.2d 222, 231 (1974).
A rational determination must be sustained, Matter of Ward v. City of Long Beach, 20 N.Y.3d 1042, 1043 (2011), but the record here contains no finding at all on the question the agency was required to decide.
Stacks Cite Check3 authorities
1 word of the source left out 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, and commercial cite-checkers are costly.
The production
What we built.
Cite Check reads a draft, finds the citations and quotations it recognizes, and checks each one against Stacks Legal: 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.
Anything that needs a second look gets a Word comment on the citation or the quoted words. A side pane groups the authorities (New York cases, other cases, and statutes and regulations), each marked OK, Check, Problem, or Not checked, with word-level differences for any quotation that doesn't match its source.
01Existence and identity
Checks Stacks Legal's own collections and citator first, then a public case-law service. 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 left out without an ellipsis, language quoted from a dissent, and misattributed quotations. It is not a substitute for Shepard's or KeyCite.
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.
06Privacy, stated plainly
The brief's text is never logged. CourtListener receives only citation strings, and the optional AI check sends only the located passage to Anthropic.
Under the hood
How it’s made.
- ClientOffice.js task-pane add-in with a Home-tab ribbon command
- ServiceCheck service running alongside Stacks Legal, with queued jobs
- AccessSingle sign-on with Stacks Legal accounts
- InstallWord for Windows and Mac, Word on the web, or tenant-wide through Microsoft 365
Stack: Office.js · Python · OAuth 2.1