Cite Checking a Legal Brief: Table of Authorities

Cite checking a legal brief means verifying, for every authority in it, that the case exists, that the citation is formatted and pinpointed correctly, that the quoted language matches the source, that the proposition is actually supported, and that the authority is still good law. The table of authorities is the by-product: Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 28(a)(3) requires "a table of authorities" listing "cases (alphabetically arranged), statutes, and other authorities" with "references to the pages of the brief where they are cited." Build the table last, from a brief you have already checked, because a table generated from unverified cites just makes the errors easier for opposing counsel to find.

Every litigator has a version of the same story: a brief goes out at 11:40pm, and somebody notices at 9am that a case was reversed last spring. Cite checking is the boring, unglamorous step that prevents it, and it is the step that gets compressed when the filing deadline compresses. What follows is the sequence that actually catches things, in the order that catches the most for the least time.

What is cite checking?

Cite checking is document-level verification of every authority a brief relies on. It is broader than Shepardizing, which is a single-case question, and broader than proofreading, which is a formatting question. A full cite check asks five things about each authority, and they fail in different ways.

The middle three are where most real errors live, and they are the ones software is worst at. A citation can be perfectly formatted, perfectly current, and still be cited for a proposition the case does not support. No tool catches that. A person reading the pinpoint catches it.

How do you cite check a brief, step by step?

Work in passes rather than case by case. Going authority by authority through all five checks means five context switches per cite and a high chance of losing your place. Doing one check across the whole brief is faster and more accurate.

Pass one: pull every authority. Read the brief and list every case, statute, rule, regulation, and secondary source, in order, with the page it appears on. This list becomes your table of authorities later, so capture the page numbers now. If the brief cites the same case eight times, you want all eight page numbers, not one.

Pass two: verify existence and format. Look up each citation and confirm the case is real, the parties match, the reporter and page are right, and the court and year parenthetical are correct. This is also where you catch short-form problems: an id. that no longer refers to what it did before an intervening edit, or a supra pointing at a source that was cut. Our guide on how to read a legal citation covers what each component is claiming.

Pass three: verify the quotes and the pinpoints. Open the opinion and read the cited page. Confirm the quotation matches character for character, including ellipses and brackets, and confirm the pinpoint is the page where the proposition actually appears rather than the first page of the case. This is the slowest pass and the one worth protecting when time is short.

Pass four: run every authority through a citator. Check treatment, filter to negative and cautionary results, filter to your jurisdiction, and read anything that looks like it touches your point. A legal citator narrows the reading, but it does not do the reading, and the different citators disagree with one another more than most lawyers realize. Our step-by-step on how to Shepardize a case covers the filtering sequence.

Pass five: build the table of authorities and reconcile it. Generate the table, then compare it against the list you made in pass one. Anything in one list and not the other is an error you have just caught: a cite that was never marked, a case dropped in an edit but still in the table, or a page reference that moved when the brief was reformatted.

What goes in a table of authorities?

Cases alphabetically, then statutes, then other authorities, each with the pages where it appears. That grouping comes straight from Rule 28(a)(3), and most state appellate rules and local rules follow the same pattern. Within the "other authorities" group, practice varies by court: rules, regulations, constitutional provisions, legislative history, and secondary sources are frequently broken into their own headings, and the safest move is to copy the structure from a brief recently accepted by the same court.

Two conventions catch people out. First, the page references have to be to the brief, not to the reporter, and they have to survive the final formatting pass. Second, an authority cited on many pages is conventionally shown as passim rather than a long string of numbers, and courts differ on the threshold at which that becomes acceptable. If a local rule or a clerk's preference speaks to it, follow that rather than the default in your word processor.

How do you create a table of authorities in Word?

Mark each citation, then insert the table. In Word, select the full citation the first time it appears and press Alt+Shift+I to open the Mark Citation dialog, choose the category (cases, statutes, rules, other authorities), and use "Mark All" so short forms of the same authority are captured too. When every citation is marked, put the cursor where the table belongs and use References, then Insert Table of Authorities.

The part that goes wrong is updating. Word does not refresh the table when the brief repaginates, so a table built before the final edit will show page numbers that no longer exist. Select the table and press F9 to update it, and do that after the last formatting change rather than before. If your firm uses a dedicated table of authorities tool, the same rule applies: build it last, then reconcile it by hand against your pass-one list.

How long does cite checking take?

Plan on roughly ten to twenty minutes per distinct authority for a full check on an appellate brief, less for a routine motion with familiar cases, considerably more for anything with heavy quotation or a long record. A brief with forty distinct authorities is most of a working day. That estimate is the reason cite checking gets cut, and it is also the reason the work is usually assigned to a paralegal or a junior associate rather than the person who wrote the brief.

There is a real argument for that division of labor beyond cost. The person who wrote the sentence knows what they meant it to say, and reads the cited page expecting to find it. Someone reading cold is far more likely to notice that the case does not quite get there. Firms without the bench for it often bring in a contract paralegal for the week before a filing, which is a cheaper answer than the alternative and much cheaper than a correction letter to the court.

Cite checking a brief that had AI help

Treat every authority as unverified, including the ones that look routine. The failure mode with generated text is not a subtly wrong pinpoint, it is a citation to a case that was never decided, formatted impeccably, attached to a proposition that sounds exactly right. It passes a skim. It fails the first check in the table above, which is why the existence pass is no longer a formality you can skip on cites that look familiar.

The tell is usually that the case cannot be found at all rather than that a citator flags it, because there is nothing there to flag. That distinction matters when you are moving fast: a lookup that returns nothing is the signal, and it is much easier to click past than a red flag is. We cover the sanctions decisions and the workflow that prevents this in our guide to avoiding hallucinated citations, and the same discipline applies to text a colleague drafted with AI assistance and did not flag as such.

The pre-filing checklist

• Every case, statute, and rule in the brief appears on your authority list with its page numbers
• Each citation has been opened and confirmed to be the case the brief says it is
• Every quotation has been compared against the opinion, including ellipses and brackets
• Every pinpoint lands on the page where the proposition actually appears
• Each id. and supra still points at what it did before the last round of edits
• Every authority has been run through a citator, with negative treatment in your jurisdiction read rather than skimmed
• The table of authorities was generated after the final formatting pass and reconciled against your list
• Anything you could not verify has been cut rather than filed

That last item is the one worth being strict about. An authority you could not confirm is not a weak argument, it is an unquantified risk, and the cost of removing it before filing is always lower than the cost of explaining it afterward. If you want the treatment signal and the citing opinions in one place while you work through a list, our citation check puts them on the same screen, and the citator comparison covers what each of the major tools will and will not catch.