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The situation
A draft arrives carrying a dozen authorities. Some were read in full by the person who first found them. Some came from a headnote. At least one came from an earlier draft in a different matter, where it was used for a slightly different proposition, and has been carried forward because it was already there.
Checking them properly means opening each judgment, finding the paragraph, and asking whether it actually says this, whether it was said by the majority, whether the case is still good law, and whether a later bench has read it down. That is an afternoon for a dozen citations and it is the first thing dropped when the listing moves up.
Why it is hard
A headnote is an editor's summary, not the holding
Headnotes compress. A proposition that is accurate as a summary of the case can be wrong as a statement of what any particular paragraph decided.
Obiter and dissent cite identically
Nothing in the citation format distinguishes the ratio from a passing observation or from a dissenting judge. Only reading the paragraph in its place in the judgment does.
Subsequent history is the risk nobody checks twice
A case relied on for years can be overruled, distinguished into irrelevance, or read down by a larger bench, and a note written before that happened will not mention it.
How we approach it
Kanoon IQ Litigator checks every citation in the draft against the source judgment: that the cited case exists and is correctly reported, that the paragraph relied on says what it is being used to say, and whether it falls in the majority. Citations it cannot verify against the source are flagged in red rather than passed silently.
Subsequent treatment is reported alongside: later benches that have followed, distinguished, doubted or overruled the case, each with the judgment behind it. The advocate still decides whether the authority holds. The point is that the decision is made with the paragraph on screen.
What changes
- Every citation checked against the judgment, not the headnote
- Unverifiable citations flagged in red rather than passed through
- Majority, concurrence and dissent distinguished
- Later treatment of each authority reported with the case behind it
Next
Is this your problem too?
Bring the version of it you actually have. We will tell you what it would take, including when the answer is that it is not worth doing.