The integration of artificial intelligence has fundamentally altered the pace of legal drafting, turning processes that once required hours into a matter of minutes. Yet alongside this surge in speed has emerged the proliferation of fabricated, misstated or inaccurately referenced legal authority masquerading as legitimate work product.
For Brent Britton, co-founder of BrentWorks, AI’s hallucinations are a critical threat to the trust supporting the judicial system. He developed the platform CiteSentinel to address a missing verification layer before documents are finalized for court.
“AI made legal drafting insanely fast, but it also made fake law look legit,” Britton explained. “It lies to your face. CiteSentinel exists to close that trust gap by scanning legal documents and flagging legal authorities that may be fabricated, misstated or inaccurately referenced before they hit a judge’s desk.”
The Verification Gap
Britton noted, “The need was obvious: Lawyers were getting the speed of AI without the verification layer that professional responsibility demands.”
Rather than attempting to replace an attorney’s existing software, CiteSentinel functions as a targeted checkpoint. The user uploads a draft, and the system extracts the citations, verifies them against live case databases and flags discrepancies.
Britton said the tool’s narrow focus was deliberate: “It is not trying to become your research platform, your drafting platform, your practice management system or your robot associate. It is a verification layer. Drop it in before filing, before sending or before walking into court.”
Not Immunity, but a Blind Spot
While industry discussions frequently consider whether or not a firm should adopt AI, opting out of the technology may not shield a practitioner from risk.
“Respectfully, that is not immunity. That is a blind spot,” he said. “You may not use AI, but your associate might, your contract lawyer might, your client might, your co-counsel might and opposing counsel absolutely might.”
The attorney who signs the signature block carries the burden of compliance, regardless of how the brief was constructed. “Once your name is on the filing, the court is not interested in your tech philosophy,” Britton added. “The question is whether the authority is real and whether you verified it.”
Ethics, Competence and a Moving Standard
As judicial systems across the country confront AI-generated errors, Britton expects utilizing dedicated verification tools will soon transition from a recommended practice to an ethical necessity under rules governing supervision and technical competence.
“Competence used to mean knowing the law,” he said. “Now it also means knowing the tools that create legal work product and knowing how to supervise the risks those tools introduce.”
Colorado as a Bellwether
Colorado courts are at the forefront of formalizing these expectations. Standing orders from federal judges mandate that attorneys certify their AI-assisted filings have been reviewed for factual and legal accuracy; noncompliant documents face being stricken from the record.
“Colorado is a perfect example of where the market is going,” Britton said. “CiteSentinel gives lawyers a clean verification step before certification, so the lawyer is not just signing a vibe. They are signing after a focused citation audit.”
Real Versus Fake
A huge obstacle for attorneys is that AI hallucinations have evolved past obvious structural errors and fabricated citations easily mimic legitimate legal authority with high fidelity.
“Fake citations are getting gorgeous,” Britton explained. “They have plausible names, plausible reporters, plausible courts, plausible dates.”
Instead of relying on linguistic pattern recognition, CiteSentinel validates individual citations against authoritative case registries. It specifically looks for structural mismatches, such as a citation sentence with a valid volume and page number but names that do not match the official record.
“Obscure is fine; imaginary is not,” Britton said.
The Next Frontier
In its current iteration, CiteSentinel appraises whether a cited case exists and matches the record.
However, “the sneakier failure mode is a real case cited for a proposition it does not actually support,” Britton said.
Future product versions from BrentWorks are being engineered to tackle contextual interpretation.
Checking Opposing Counsel
As the legal industry is historically resistant to software that interrupts established daily habits, CiteSentinel was designed “to be boring in the best possible way,” Britton said.
While firms are often confident in their internal quality control, they can be skeptical of filings coming from across the aisle.
“When we were interviewing potential customers and validating the market for the product, many of the lawyers we interviewed said, ‘Well, I don’t need it for my documents, surely, but I would definitely run opposing counsel’s docs through it,’” Britton recalled. “But the same tool that proofs the other side’s work can keep you and your team honest as well. After all, it also catches typos and flat-out mistakes in citations.”
Complementing the Legal Giants
As legacy legal research platforms develop internal AI tools and verification ecosystems, specialized startups face a strategic choice between direct competition or niche integration.
“We are building a surgical instrument,” Britton said. “We need to solve one painful, high-stakes problem faster, cleaner and with less friction.”
Britton views CiteSentinel as an independent safety check that sits at the absolute end of a document’s lifecycle. He said, “Think of it as the spell check for legal authority, except the typo can cost you sanctions.”
Access and Accountability
Despite the complex engineering required to monitor changing AI outputs, Britton believes verification software must remain financially accessible, particularly for smaller firms and solo practitioners who operate without extensive backup infrastructure.
“The solo lawyer and the small firm are often the ones with the least margin for a public mistake,” he said. “Big Law has committees, vendors and layers of review. A solo practitioner may have one shot before filing. The product is meant to be practical, not precious.”
A Cultural Shift in Legal Practice
Ultimately, “I want verification to become muscle memory,” he said.
“The culture shift is from ‘did AI write this’ to ‘did a competent lawyer verify this,’” he continued. “AI is not the enemy of the legal profession. Unverified AI is. The lawyers who win this era will be the ones who build verification into the workflow and move faster because they can trust what they file.”