Since 2023, courts have sanctioned lawyers for briefs built on cases that never existed. Vera reads any legal text and checks every citation against the real court record — so a fabricated case, a wrong name, or an overruled precedent can't slip through.
Ask a legal question. We send it to an AI, then verify every case it cites — live. Watch it invent authority, and watch us catch it.
This isn't hypothetical. Since a New York lawyer filed a brief full of cases ChatGPT invented, courts on five continents have caught the same mistake over and over — often only because a judge or opposing counsel checked the citations by hand. Vera does that check in seconds.
Two attorneys submitted a brief citing at least six cases that did not exist — Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, Shaboon v. Egyptair, and others. ChatGPT had invented them, complete with fake quotes and fake internal citations, and even "confirmed" they were real when asked. The court sanctioned both lawyers and their firm.
Aggregate figures from the public AI Hallucinations legal database maintained by Damien Charlotin (snapshot: Sept 2026). Individual cases are drawn from public court records — verify any of them the same way Vera does: against the source.
Vera exists because generative AI has one specific, dangerous failure: it invents legal authority. It will produce a case name, a reporter citation, a year, and a confident quotation — for a case that does not exist. Lawyers have filed these fabrications in real courts, and real judges have sanctioned them for it.
Every other AI tool answers the way it broke: by generating more text. Vera does the opposite. It generates nothing. It reads the citations already in front of it and checks each one against the public court record — ground truth, not a guess. The result is reproducible and auditable: run it twice and get the same answer, and follow every link back to the source opinion.
Vera is built precision-first: it would rather say “verify this manually” than falsely accuse a real case. A citation is only called fabricated when there is a full case name and no case by that name exists anywhere in the record. Everything uncertain is surfaced as uncertain — never dressed up as a verdict.
Vera was built by Atharv Pratap Singh Chauhan, a student at IIT Bombay, out of one conviction: software that people rely on in court should never answer “trust me.” It should show its work against the record — every case, every quote, every time.
Vera was created at LexHack 2026. Case data comes from the CourtListener API by the nonprofit Free Law Project; citations are parsed with eyecite. Real-world figures on the “Why it matters” page are drawn from the public AI-hallucinations legal database maintained by Damien Charlotin.