RealityCheck availability depends on your credit balance. Results assist legal review; they do not replace reading the controlling source yourself.
Document review tells you whether a citation is formatted correctly. RealityCheck answers a different, harder question: does the citation actually say what your sentence claims it says. It cross-references every citation in the document against case law databases and reports a verdict.
RealityCheck is the one feature in BriefCatch that spends credits. Everything else — upload, review, suggestions, citation-format corrections, reports, exports — is free. If you run out of credits, that is the only thing that stops.
What it checks
|
|
|
|
Starting a run
Open Reality Check in the sidebar and select Start Citation Review. This is a deliberate, explicit action — RealityCheck never runs on its own, because it is the operation that costs credits. If the panel shows “You’re out of credits. Reality Check is the only feature that uses them — top up to run it,” that is the wall; see Usage and credits.
A run works through several stages, each shown in the panel:
-
Preparing to process your document
Setup before analysis begins. -
Finding and extracting citations
Every citation in the document is located. -
Extracting claims
The proposition each citation is being used to support. -
Analyzing claims and legal assertions
The claim is checked against the source. -
Verifying citations against legal databases
The citation itself is confirmed. -
Generating verification results
Verdicts are compiled into the report.
This runs for several minutes on a real brief — it is genuinely checking sources, not pattern-matching text. The panel shows progress as N of M citations complete, so you can see it moving rather than staring at a spinner.
A run just started: the first stage is active, the next is still queued, and the counter reads 0 of 100 citations. The progress bar and the N of M counter both move as citations clear.
The four verdicts
Every citation lands in exactly one bucket:
| Verdict | What it means |
|---|---|
| Correct | The citation supports the proposition it is cited for. |
| Caution | Something about the citation or its use warrants a second look — not wrong, but not a clean pass. |
| Incorrect | The cited authority does not support the proposition as used. |
| Not Verifiable | RealityCheck could not confirm the use with confidence, one way or the other. |
The filter row groups these into three working buckets: Verified (Correct), Needs review (Caution and Not Verifiable together), and Incorrect. Filtering to “Needs review” is usually where your attention should go first — it is deliberately the union of “flagged” and “uncertain,” rather than making you check both.
A card can also carry a specific issue tag beyond its verdict — Fabricated Quote is the sharpest one: a quotation attributed to the source that does not actually appear in it.
Results for a one-citation run: the citation came back Not Verifiable, with a finding explaining that a temporary retrieval issue — not a problem with the citation itself — prevented verification, and a Fix suggesting a re-run.
Reading a card
Each verdict card carries the citation, the verdict badge, the source detail RealityCheck found, and — for a flagged citation — an explanation of what does not line up. Selecting Go to this citation in the document jumps you to the passage.
Read the source yourself before changing a filing. RealityCheck assists legal judgment; it is not a substitute for it, and the product does not pretend otherwise.
Working the results
- Filter to a verdict group to focus your attention.
- Dismiss verdict removes a reviewed item from the working list once you have handled it. Restore all brings dismissed items back if you need to revisit one.
- Dismissed items are skipped when you add verifications to the document as comments, so a dismissed card will not clutter the document with a note you already resolved.
- Give feedback on a card — helpful or not helpful, with an optional note — feeds back into how the checks are tuned.
Exporting
Download the Reality Check report produces a PDF with every verdict and its detail — separate from the plain-text summary on the Reports tab, and the one export built specifically for sharing citation-substance findings outside the product.
Stale results
If you edit the document substantially after a run, the verdicts may no longer line up with the current text. BriefCatch flags this rather than silently showing stale results next to new text — re-run RealityCheck to get verdicts that match what is on the page now. A new run recharges credits; it is a fresh check, not a diff against the old one.