| name | uk-citation-verification |
| title | uk-citation-verification |
| description | Use when users say "verify these UK citations", "check this skeleton for hallucinated cases", "BAILII/FCL check", "is this EWCA citation real", or need UK authorities, paragraph references, case names, or quotations checked against public sources. |
| author | LegalQuants |
| author_url | https://github.com/LegalQuants/lq-skills/tree/main/skills/uk-citation-verification |
| license | Apache-2.0 |
| version | 0.1.0 |
| execution_mode | open |
| jurisdiction | gb |
| practice | litigation |
| language | en |
| tags | ["citation","uk","bailii","find-case-law","hallucination-detection"] |
uk-citation-verification
When to Use
- A draft cites UK cases and needs a pre-filing citation audit.
- AI-generated legal text may contain hallucinated authorities.
- A user wants to verify neutral citations, party names, report citations, or quoted passages.
- A cited proposition needs to be tied back to the authority actually retrieved.
This skill verifies existence and citation integrity. It does not decide the merits of the case.
For Scotland, Northern Ireland, tribunal-specific, or devolved materials, identify the applicable official source before treating the citation as verified.
Audience and Work Shape
Audience: UK litigators, trainees, paralegals, and legal researchers checking draft legal text before lawyer review or filing.
Work shape: pattern-matched verification. The skill resolves and classifies citations; it does not decide whether the authority supports a proposition.
Legal Failure Modes
- Legal support, not legal advice: citation existence and integrity checks do not decide merits or legal propositions.
- Privilege/confidentiality: drafts may be privileged or confidential. Use only approved environments or user-supplied/public sources; do not send client drafts to unapproved services.
- Accountability: unresolved, ambiguous, traditional, or lower-confidence authorities remain for lawyer/researcher review.
Access Modes
This skill works in three modes:
- Live source mode - use browser, web search, MCP, API, or other configured access to retrieve public authority sources.
- User-supplied source mode - use judgment PDFs, HTML, text, screenshots, exports, URLs, or pasted source material supplied by the user.
- No-source mode - extract citations and prepare a verification queue, but do not mark citations as verified.
If the source cannot be retrieved or supplied, do not verify from model memory. Mark the item unverified-source-unavailable and ask for a source, URL, export, or connector.
How It Works
1. Extract citations
Parse the text for:
- Neutral citations, such as
[2024] UKSC 1, [2023] EWCA Civ 10, [2022] EWHC 123 (KB).
- Traditional law report citations where present.
- Case names adjacent to citations.
- Paragraph references and quoted passages tied to a citation.
Keep each citation's location in the source document.
2. Resolve against public sources
