Every Citation Checked: How We Audit the Law Inside Our Plans

A matter plan that cites the wrong case is worse than one that cites none. A practitioner who trusts it walks into a hearing with an authority that does not say what they think it says. So this month we stopped assuming our citations were right and checked all of them.

What We Did

We extracted all 447 case citations from the plans and checked each one against a source we could open: the court's own judgment database, a neutral citation lookup, or a published law report. Every citation got a verdict. Of those we could resolve, about one in six was wrong: the number pointed to a different case, or the case could not be found anywhere.

• 54 citations were renumbered to the correct reference.
• 89 were removed, together with any sentence describing what they supposedly held.
• Plans that stated the opposite of their authority, or rested on the wrong case, were rewritten from the statute or the correct judgment.
• No citation on the site is now unchecked or known to be wrong.

Finding a Case Is Not Enough

The most important lesson was that a citation that exists is not a citation that supports the sentence. Around twenty of our fixes were real cases cited for something they do not decide. Every authority added to a plan now needs its judgment read, not just located.

Links Get the Same Treatment

We then checked every link in every plan with a live request. A check that only reads the status code would have passed 106 legislation links that loaded fine and opened the wrong Act. We now compare the page each link lands on with the label we gave it.

Every plan carries a content hash and every change is logged, so a correction can be traced to the plan it changed and the day it changed. If you find something we got wrong, tell us. That is what the suggestion button on every task is for.