citation-check

Citation check with ocl

Use this whenever a draft, memo, brief or answer cites Swiss court decisions (BGE/ATF/DTF, BGer dockets such as 4A_747/2012, cantonal dockets) or quotes an Erwägung. Existence is checked against the corpus; legal support is not.

Steps

1. If the draft is a file (.docx, .md, .html, .txt), run ocl check <draft> --format json --no-report > check.json: the citations and the quotations next to them are found in the prose and checked in one go (install: pipx install opencaselaw-cli or uv tool install opencaselaw-cli). Otherwise extract every citation into references.jsonl, one JSON line each, exactly as the author wrote it, long form included: {"reference": "BGer 4A_747/2012 vom 5. April 2013, E. 3.2"}, with a quote field for quoted passages.
2. Run ocl citations resolve --input references.jsonl --format jsonl > resolution.jsonl for a list; the rows have the same shape as check's results. check also returns statutes (Art./§ references: statute_found, article_missing, article_empty, law_unknown, unverifiable, error) and unparsed (citation-like strings that were not checked); report both.
3. Read every row. resolved means the decision exists and carries a label the author wrote (and the pinpoint, if any, exists: pinpoint_status: retrieved). pinpoint_unavailable means the decision exists but the numbered passage is not indexed; with pinpoint_status: parent_retrieved the parent Erwägung's text is in the row and the lettered part must be located inside it. discrepancy means the decision exists but the date or the docket the author wrote next to it is wrong: report discrepancies verbatim. missing means no such decision in the corpus: flag it for the author; never replace it with a "close" citation. ambiguous means several decisions carry the label: name the court, ask which one, or use the decision_id. unrecognized means the service proposed a decision that does not carry the author's label: treat it as unverified, and never report service_candidate as the citation.
4. For quoted passages, run ocl quotes check --input quotes.jsonl --format jsonl with one row per quotation (reference, pinpoint when cited, quote exactly as the author wrote it). exact stands; for near report the listed differences and replace the quotation with the served wording; for not_found tell the author the quotation is not in the served text that was compared (the closest served text is shown); for unverifiable (no served text: offline without an indexed pinpoint) say the quotation was not checked and must be checked against the decision, never that it is not there. Do not paraphrase inside quotation marks.
5. Report per citation: reference, status, decision_id, canonical citation string from the service, pinpoint status, discrepancies. State that this establishes existence and wording only, not that the authority supports the proposition.