Use RealityCheck
What RealityCheck actually checks, the four verdicts, why it costs credits when the rest of review does not, and how to work the results.
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
Citation Verification
Cross-references each citation against case law databases.
Issue Flagging
Surfaces incomplete, incorrect, or questionable references — including a citation that does not appear to correspond to a real authority.
Structured Report
An exportable summary with a verdict and full detail for every citation checked.
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
Finding and extracting citations
Extracting claims
Analyzing claims and legal assertions
Verifying citations against legal databases
Generating verification results
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.
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.
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.
Related: Correct citation format for the formatting side of citations, and Usage and credits for what a run costs and how the ledger reads it.