CiteCheck checks the Australian case citations in a document against an
index of 689,144 published decisions from 83 courts and tribunals,
built from public sources including AustLII, the courts' own judgment
databases, and the Open Australian Legal Corpus. It is independently built
and run in Australia.
CiteCheck is a checking aid, not legal advice. A verified citation means
the citation matches the public record; it does not certify that the
authority stands for what a document says it does, or that it remains good
law. Read the authorities yourself.
Privacy and storage
Documents are sent over an encrypted connection and processed in memory.
They are never written to disk and are not used for anything other than the
check you asked for.
The checked copy of your document is held in server memory only so that
you can view and download it. It is dropped shortly afterwards (the server
keeps only the most recent handful of checks in memory, and every restart
clears them all).
The only records kept are counts: how many checks ran and the tally of
verdicts, with a timestamp. No document content, no case names from your
document, and no IP addresses are stored.
The service runs on a server located in Sydney, Australia.
In plain terms: your document is not sitting on our side
after your check. Nothing is ever saved to disk, no person ever sees it, and
the temporary working copy behind your report view is discarded automatically
soon after. The software also never "reads" your document the way a person
would: it mechanically finds citation patterns and looks each one up in the
index, and the rest of the text is ignored.
What it checks, and what it does not
Checked: Australian case citations, both medium-neutral
(like [2020] HCA 5) and reported series (like (1992) 175 CLR 1), against
689,144 decisions of 83 courts and tribunals,
from the earliest reported series to decisions handed down this month.
Not checked: legislation, regulations, overseas
authorities (marked "Foreign, not checked"), journal articles and books, and
whether a quotation or pinpoint reference is accurate.
Coverage depth varies by court and era. Some series are only selectively
published, so a citation that cannot be matched is flagged for you to check
via a link — an unmatched citation is never, on its own, called fake.
Strong "no record" findings are only made for court-years where the
index is effectively complete.