doc.haus Atlas Legal-document workflows on OpenCode, bound to their code
219 documents
dochaus/skill/citation-verification/SKILL.md

Grounding discipline for every matter-document and case-law claim: quote-first extract-then-assert-then-retract ordering with abstention allowed, anti-sycophancy premise checks, cite-tool anchoring of verbatim 10-600 character quotes, the exact/re-anchor/reject verification ladder with re-ingest advice, no paraphrase-and-retry on failure, and case-law claims only from live tool results with US-only routing. Read whenever quoting, citing, or asserting facts about matter documents or authority.

Open in the Skills & Prompts Explorer →

A lawyer must never be handed a quote whose text does not exist in the document, or a case that does not exist in the reporter. Every factual claim about a matter document is anchored before it is presented; every case-law claim comes from a live lookup. Memory is not a source.

Work in the order quote → assert → retract, never assert → find a quote to fit.
  • Extract the supporting span before the claim. For any sourced statement, first locate the verbatim span in the matter document (search-document / read-document) that supports it. If no retrieved span supports a point, the point has "No relevant quotes found" — do not make it.
  • Assert only from extracted quotes. Every claim must trace to a span you actually pulled. Do not back-fill a quote to justify a conclusion you already wrote; the quote comes first and the claim follows from it.
  • Retract the unsupported. Before presenting an answer, drop any claim that no extracted span supports rather than leaving it standing as if grounded.
  • Abstention is allowed and correct. "I can't find this in the matter's approved sources" is a valid answer. Prefer it over an answer assembled from general legal knowledge — the matter's documents (and, for authority, the case-law tool) are the only source of truth; your training never substitutes for them or fills a gap they leave open.
- **Do not adopt the user's premise.** A request can carry a false legal or jurisdiction premise ("since this is governed by New York law ...", "the cap is $5M, so ..."). Verify the premise against the documents before relying on it, and answer the corrected question. - **Surface and correct false premises** rather than quietly answering on top of them. Reporting that the documents contradict the premise is more useful than agreement. - **Refuse to manufacture authority.** Never invent or recall a clause, section number, case, reporter citation, or governing-law fact to support an unsupported position or to agree with the user. An unbacked position stays unbacked and is reported as such. - **Anchor every quotation.** Before any passage from a matter document goes into an answer, call `cite` with it. All four required args matter: `docPath` (the absolute path exactly as search-document or read-document returned it — never a guessed or reconstructed path), `documentName` (the human-readable name), `quote`, and `reason` (why the passage supports the claim), plus an honest integer `confidence` 1-5. - **Quotes are verbatim, 10-600 characters.** Copy the text exactly as the document returned it: no paraphrase, no added or removed ellipses, no normalized punctuation or "cleaned up" spacing. Under 10 characters the tool rejects the call — extend the quote with its surrounding sentence. Over 600, split it into consecutive quotes or quote the operative sentence and put the surroundings in the optional `context` arg. - **Claims without a quote are claims without support.** A statement like "the agreement has no cap on liability" must rest on cited text (the clause that governs liability, quoted) or be presented as unverified. Do not present a conclusion about a document's contents with no anchored passage behind it. Every citation any tool returns — search-document hits and cite anchors alike — is re-checked against the live file before you see it, on a three-step ladder:
  1. exact — the stored span still reproduces the excerpt verbatim: verified.
  2. re-anchor — the excerpt moved (the document was edited after indexing) but still appears; the span is repaired and marked re-anchored: verified, but the search index is stale.
  3. reject — the excerpt is nowhere in the live document: the citation is dropped.

When a result reports re-anchored or rejected citations, relay the recommendation to re-upload (re-ingest) the named document — search stays inaccurate until then. Never quote or rely on a rejected passage.

When `cite` cannot verify a quote, the quote is wrong — the tool re-extracted the live document and the text is not in it.
  • Re-read, then re-quote. Go back to read-document or search-document, find the passage, and copy the verified text verbatim into a new cite call.
  • Never paraphrase-and-retry. Reworking the failed quote from memory — shuffling words, trimming clauses, "fixing" it until something passes — is manufacturing a fabricated quotation. The only acceptable retry is text freshly copied from a tool result.
  • If the passage genuinely is not in the document, say so. "I could not verify this in [document]" is a correct answer; an unanchored quotation never is.
- Case names, reporter citations, holdings, and quotations from opinions come ONLY from the `case-law` tool's results (or a connected CourtListener source), never from memory — a remembered case is presumptively fabricated. Cite only cases the tool returned, with the citation and URL it returned. - The corpus is U.S. opinions only. On a non-U.S. matter, do not present its results as binding authority — flag them as U.S. precedent and route jurisdiction-specific authority questions to the supervising lawyer. - When the tool returns nothing or is unreachable, report that. Never fill the gap with an invented or recalled citation. - Auditing the citations in a finished brief or memo is its own procedure: the cite-check skill.