The founders behind Certavi

In 2023, a federal judge sanctioned an attorney $5,000 for filing a brief full of citations that didn't exist. The citations looked real. The case names sounded plausible. But they were fabricated by an AI tool the attorney trusted without verifying.

That case made headlines, but the problem it exposed is older than AI. Attorneys have always faced the risk of bad citations — whether from sloppy research, inherited briefs, or junior associates who cut corners. What changed is the scale. AI drafting tools can produce dozens of plausible-sounding citations in seconds, and there was no fast, reliable way to check them all.

We built Certavi because we believe verification should be deterministic, not probabilistic. Every citation check traces to an actual database query with a recorded response and a timestamp. No AI decides whether a citation is real — that determination comes from a database lookup, the same way an attorney would check it manually, just faster and at scale.

Our team brings together decades of litigation experience, enterprise technology leadership, and deep expertise in natural language processing. We didn't build Certavi to replace attorney judgment. We built it to give attorneys a tool that watches their back — so they can walk into court knowing every citation in their filing has been checked against an authoritative source.