We examined 492,581 legal citations and quotes in 14,997 real Illinois court filings. Here is everything — including what we couldn’t check.
On July 13, 2026, LawEngine’s deterministic checker — no language model makes the call — examined 492,581 legal citations and quoted passages across 14,997 publicly filed documents from the Illinois Supreme Court and all five Appellate districts, against a frozen snapshot of 839,836 sections of law, in under four hours. This is the research run behind our public Document Assessment — published with the receipts, the plain labels, and the limits stated out loud.
14,997
real Illinois court filings
492,581
citations & quotes examined
839,836
sections of law in the frozen snapshot
The corpus
Real filings, from the courts’ own portal.
The 14,997 documents are publicly filed court papers — appellate briefs, petitions for leave to appeal, replies, motions, memoranda — obtained through Illinois’s official re:SearchIL portal, spanning the Illinois Supreme Court and all five Appellate districts. We say “court filings,” not “briefs,” because most of them aren’t briefs — and precision about small things is how you earn trust on big ones.
Every citation was checked against a frozen, fingerprinted snapshot of LawEngine’s source-law library — 839,836 sections of law — so any result can be re-run against exactly the law the checker saw. The run was a research evaluation on our own servers: 14,997 of 14,997 documents accounted for, end to end in under four hours. That is research-run speed on already-extracted text — not a claim about how fast the website is.
What we actually counted
Every one of the 492,581 says exactly what we did — and what we didn’t.
We counted every citation and quoted passage as it appears in a filing — cite the same case three times and that is three, so 492,581 is not 492,581 different cases. Depending on the citation, the checker compared quoted text word-for-word against the law itself, confirmed the cited case or statute actually exists, or — where a citation fell outside our coverage — said “not checked” instead of guessing. Every result carries its label and its receipt.
The honest limits are the swagger. A checker that admits what it couldn’t check is the only kind whose confirmations mean anything.
And what did it flag? 331 citations across 218 filings that look wrong and deserve a lawyer’s attention — each flag with a receipt attached.
The signature find
The citation that cannot exist — and the court’s own PDF that carries it.
Illinois public-domain citations are built by rule. Under Illinois Supreme Court Rule 6, the identifier comes from the last six digits of the docket number: docket 1-18-2605 yields 182605-U. That makes a seven-digit form like “1182605-U” — the district digit duplicated into the number — structurally impossible. No such citation can be right. But a literal text search will still happily “find” it.
Then we went looking for it. In a separate scan on July 13, 2026 — distinct from the 14,997-filing run — we searched the imported text of 183,796 Illinois Appellate opinion and order records (sourced from illinoiscourts.gov and the state’s older archive) for the impossible pattern. We found it 221 times, across 169 court records— over a hundred and sixty records, 21 published opinions and 148 unpublished orders, each carrying a citation number that Illinois’s own rule says cannot exist. These are not judgment calls: a seven-digit public-domain citation is wrong by rule, every single time.
221
impossible citations found
169
court records carrying one
1
in the court’s own PDF header
That one is People v. Borders, docket 1-18-2605, carrying “1182605-U” in the court’s own PDF header. This is not a lawyer’s typo — it originates in the official document itself. Which is exactly the point:
“The search found it” is not the same as “the citation is right.” Only a checker that knows the rule — and checks the source — can tell the difference.
Scan of 183,796 Illinois Appellate opinion and order records · July 13, 2026
Use it
The same checker, on your document, before you file.
The public version of this run is LawEngine’s Document Assessment: upload a document and get a deterministic, source-backed read that separates citation-and-quote issues from attorney-review items — green when source text was compared, a lighter green when a citation exists but its quotation was not assessed, amber for lawyer-review items, red for receipt-backed likely filing errors. The boundaries hold there too: case-law quote verification and good-law treatment checking are not offered features — they are roadmap, and we say so.
Catch citation and quotation problems before filing — with a receipt for every flag.
Methodology, the run audit, and count verification for any figure in this story: press@lawengine.ai.
— Stephen Murphy, Founder, LawEngine
I build LawEngine because the people who have to follow the law deserve to see the receipts behind it — freely, and with the uncertainty shown instead of buried.