Pre-launch — nothing has shipped yet

Built on the assumption that you will check every cite.

Silicon Docket is an early-stage legal technology company building SaaS solutions to legal software problems, for lawyers, law students, and anyone writing legal articles. Our first products are in development and neither is generally available yet. Both are designed around the same constraint: nothing is correct just because software said so.

Join the early-access waitlist See what we’re building

Every flag is written to be argued with, not accepted on faith.

motion-to-dismiss.docx

Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009).

Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 570 (2007).

Id. at 679.

Rule 4.1 · short form

Id. resolves to Twombly, the immediately preceding authority, not Iqbal. Use a short form naming the intended case.

14 citations parsed 1 form finding · 0 silent edits

Illustration of a finding. Not a product screenshot.

What we are building

Two tools, one job: make citation problems visible before a court, a professor, or a journal editor finds them.

Both are in development. Neither is available today, and we will not describe them as though they were.

Case Law Citation Checker

In development

Reads a brief, memo, article, or note and reports what is wrong with its citations, rule by rule.

The checker parses the citations in a document and evaluates them against Bluebook form: signals, short-form sequence, typeface conventions, pincites, reporter abbreviations, and the form of subsequent-history notations. Each finding is reported with the rule it comes from and the position in the document where it appears. It is a checker, not a citation generator — it does not author authority, and it does not treat a well-formed citation as a verified one.

Tracks full form against short form across the document, and flags id., supra, and hereinafter used where the preceding citation does not support them.
Checks introductory signals — see, see also, cf., but see, contra — for ordering and punctuation within a string cite. Which signal a proposition calls for stays the drafter’s judgement.
Reviews reporter abbreviations, court-and-year parentheticals, pincites, parallel citations, and typeface — Bluepages roman and italics in a brief or memo, large-and-small capitals for books and periodicals in a footnoted article or note.
Separates form from substance: form problems are flagged on their own account; the existence and accuracy of the underlying authority are surfaced for confirmation, never assumed.

Drafting Assistant for Microsoft Word

In development

A Word task pane that reads the document you are already drafting and marks citation problems in place.

The add-in runs beside the open document in Word, reads the text as it stands, and highlights citations where something looks wrong. Proposed corrections arrive as tracked changes you accept or reject like any other edit, so nothing enters the document without your click. It is built to fit the way you already draft — your templates, your house style, your review chain — instead of moving that work into a separate portal.

Works on the document in place in the task pane: no export, no reformatting, no separate upload step in the drafting loop.
Marks each citation in the text and explains, alongside it, what appears to be wrong and which Bluebook rule is at issue.
Proposes every fix as a tracked change — attributable and reversible — so the edit history shows what was suggested and what a person accepted.
Assembles and updates a table of authorities from the citations it recognizes, listing unrecognized or ambiguous entries separately for review.

How it works

The document is parsed, not paraphrased.

Draft the way you already do

Write in Word — in your firm’s templates, your journal’s house style, or just your own notes. The assistant sits in the task pane next to the document. Finished briefs, memos, articles, and notes can also be run through the checker on their own.

Citations are read in order

Citations are identified in the text and classified — full form, short form, id., supra — in the order they appear, so short-form rules are evaluated against what actually precedes them rather than against the citation in isolation.

Every flag comes with a reason

Findings are reported with the rule at issue and the location in the document. You can see why the tool thinks something is wrong, which means you can disagree with it. Silent corrections are not the design.

You verify, then you decide

Fixes arrive as tracked changes to accept or reject. Before you rely on it — whether that means filing, submitting, or turning it in — confirm that each authority exists, says what you cited it for, and remains good law, using Westlaw, Lexis, or the official reporter. The tool is a first pass, not the last word.

Commitments

What we will and will not do with your work product.

These are design commitments made before launch, not certifications we hold. We have said plainly below which is which.

Confidentiality is the design constraint, not a setting

The documents this software touches range from privileged client work product to an unpublished manuscript or student paper. Our commitment: your documents will not be used to train models, will not be shared with other customers, and will not be retained beyond what a request requires. We would rather build a narrower product than one that needs a broad claim on your files.

Form is checked. Authority is verified.

There is a difference between a citation that is properly formatted and a citation that is real. The tools keep those two questions apart — reporting form problems on their own account, and pointing you to an authoritative source for the existence, accuracy, and current validity of the authority itself.

Nothing changes your document on its own

Suggestions surface as tracked changes. A person accepts or rejects each one, and the document history records which. No automatic rewrites, no autonomous filing, and no suggestion that enters the document without a person accepting it.

We will not claim credentials we do not have

Silicon Docket is pre-launch. We hold no security certifications today, have no customers to point to, and have no accuracy figures worth publishing. We intend to document our data handling and sub-processors before anyone puts a real client file through the product, and to say plainly when any of this changes.

Questions

The ones a skeptical reader asks first.

Can this tool fabricate a case the way a chatbot does?

The checker’s job is to evaluate citations you wrote, not to produce new ones, which removes the most common path to a fabricated cite. That is a design choice, not a guarantee, and it does not relieve anyone of the duty to confirm every authority in an authoritative source before filing, submitting, or turning anything in. Where the software offers any generated text, it is presented as a proposal for you to accept or reject, and we will say so in the interface rather than in the fine print.

Can I use it today?

No. Both products are in development and neither is generally available. The waitlist is for early access when there is something real to test; joining it commits you to nothing, and we will not pretend a beta is a launch.

Does this replace cite-checking by an associate, a clerk, or a journal’s citation editors?

No, and we do not intend to sell it that way. It is built to catch the mechanical, high-volume errors — short-form sequence, signal punctuation, reporter abbreviations, missing pincites — so that human review time goes to the questions that actually require judgment: whether the authority supports the proposition, and whether it is still good law.

Which citation rules does it follow?

The Bluebook is the starting point, since it governs most federal practice and legal academic writing — and it treats the two differently. Court filings and memos follow the Bluepages: ordinary type and italics, no large-and-small capitals. Law review articles, notes, and other footnoted academic writing follow the main rules, which do use large-and-small capitals for books and periodicals. The checker is built to tell the two apart rather than force one convention on both. Many courts impose local citation rules, some journals impose their own house style, and some jurisdictions use their own style manuals; none of that is covered at the outset, and we will state exactly which rules a release covers rather than implying it covers all of them. Silicon Docket is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the publishers of The Bluebook.

What happens to a document I run through it?

Nothing is running yet, so no document has been processed. The commitment we are building to is this: your documents are used only to answer your request, never to train models, never sold, never shared with other customers, and retained only as long as the request requires. Before early access opens we will publish specific data-handling terms, including sub-processors, so whoever is responsible for evaluating that — your firm’s general counsel, your school’s IT office, or you — can check them against your own standards rather than take our word for it.

What will it cost, and what does the Word add-in require?

Pricing is not set, and we would rather say that than post a number we will change. The add-in is being built for Microsoft Word through the standard Office add-in framework, with Microsoft 365 on Windows and Mac as the target. Supported versions and deployment details will be confirmed before early access, since Office environments — firm-managed, school-issued, or your own — vary.

Early access

Join the early-access waitlist

We are pre-launch. If citation accuracy is part of your work — litigator, appellate practitioner, clerk, law student, journal editor, KM or innovation lead — the waitlist gets you a first look when there is something worth your time, and a direct line to tell us where the tools are wrong. No sales sequence, no invented launch date.

Request early access Follow development

Or write to support@silicondocket.com. You will hear from us when the software is ready to be tested, not before.