Authorities & citations
It may only quote what it can open
A hallucinated citation is a career risk, not a bug. So the rule is absolute and it is not a setting.
A citation it cannot open, it does not give you, and no paraphrase is ever presented as a quotation.
In court
Counsel names a case. The judgment is already open.
Citations are recognised in speech as well as on the page, including the way they are actually said from the bar, where the year moves, the division is dropped and the parties are shortened to one name.
Counsel names a case from the bar and the judgment is already open at the paragraph relied on, with an extract formatted to read out.
Repeated lookups are cached, so the second time a case comes up in the same hearing there is no wait at all.
If the judgment is not in the index, it says so. It does not reconstruct one.
Mokoena v Minister of Police 2019 (4) SA 112 (SCA)
¶ 27 — the passage counsel is relying on, in full
Cited by them — heads of argument ¶ 19, for a different proposition
Treatment — distinguished in two later judgments
Between hearings
The table maintains itself, and it watches the ground move
Every authority, from wherever it was cited
Every case cited by anyone, and what it was cited for, with a treatment signal when one you are relying on has been overruled, distinguished or appealed since.
What it was cited for
Not only that the case appears, but the proposition it was advanced for — so the same case cited two ways is two entries rather than one.
Where they rely on your case
Where opposing counsel leans on an authority you are relying on too, for a different proposition, you are told.
Quotations ready to paste
Correct citation format, the pinpoint paragraph, the text verbatim. Never a summary wearing quotation marks.
Paragraph-level retrieval
Judgments are indexed at paragraph level, and the agent may only quote text that exists in that index.
Treatment from our own graph
Treatment signals come from a citation graph built by parsing citations out of judgment text, not licensed from a publisher.
Where the law comes from
The free layer, honestly described
The backbone is SAFLII — judgments across the South African courts, plus legislation — with the Government Gazette, the legislation portals, and the Constitutional Court and Supreme Court of Appeal’s own sites.
It has real weaknesses and there is no point pretending otherwise: no editorial layer, no headnotes, no citator, inconsistent formatting, and patchy coverage the further back you go.
So the citator is the part built here rather than bought — the piece nobody gives away.
A citation parser — normalising the SA formats, in judgments and in speech
Our own citation index — citations parsed out of judgment text, assembled into a graph
Treatment from that graph — how a judgment has been dealt with since, derived not licensed
A paragraph vector index — retrieval at the pinpoint, because that is what you quote
A cache — so the same lookup in the same hearing is instant
On headnotes, and what we have not bought
Let counsel define the gap, not the vendor
The commercial reports — Juta and LexisNexis — carry headnotes, annotations and a curated citator, and they are expensive. Licensing them on day one would mean charging you for a gap nobody has yet shown is a gap.
So the order is deliberate: build on the free layer, build the citation index over it, and licence a commercial layer only once counsel using this says what is actually missing from it.
Whether those providers permit programmatic access at all is an open question, and it is marked open rather than assumed.
No headnotes — the free layer has none, and we have not written any
No commercial citator — treatment comes from our own graph, with its limits
Older judgments — coverage thins the further back the free sources go
Nothing invented — where the index is thin, it says so instead of filling in
The grounding rule
Three refusals, and none of them configurable
A citation it cannot open
If the judgment is not in the index, the answer is that it is not in the index — not a plausible reference that turns out to be nothing.
No paraphrase dressed as a quotation
Quoted text is text that exists, at a pinpoint you can check. A summary is labelled a summary wherever it appears.
Never a smaller model
When the model it needs is unavailable it says so and stops. Degrading quietly to something less capable is how a wrong citation reaches a bench.
Test it on a citation you already know is difficult
Bring the case with the awkward history — the one that was distinguished, or appealed, or is cited two ways. That is the fastest way to see where the index stands.