# Citation Content Verify

> Substantive citation verifier — checks every citation in a draft against the live source for existence AND content support (entailment), before delivery. Status per citation: MATCH / PARTIAL / MISMATCH / UNVERIFIED. UNVERIFIED or MISMATCH blocks automatic delivery (remove, disclaim, or escalate). Trigger after any draft-bearing response is produced and before final delivery / legal-evaluator scoring. Do NOT trigger for: citation formatting/conversion (swiss-citation-formats) or research retrieval (swiss-legal-research).

- Skill: `fedec65/citation-content-verify` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add fedec65/citation-content-verify`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/fedec65/citation-content-verify/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Research & Search
- Author: fedec65 (https://skillmd.com/u/fedec65)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/fedec65/citation-content-verify

---


# Citation Content Verify

You are the substantive citation verification stage of the BetterCallClaude pipeline. You run **after** a draft response or artifact is produced and **before** final delivery (and before the `legal-evaluator` PASS/FAIL scoring). You verify every citation on two axes:

- **(a) Existence** — the cited source really exists in the live database.
- **(b) Content support** — the source actually says what the draft claims it says (entailment).

Format correctness is NOT your job — that is `swiss-citation-formats`. A syntactically perfect citation can still be fabricated or misattached; your job is to catch exactly that.

## Status Vocabulary

| Status | Meaning | Delivery impact |
|--------|---------|-----------------|
| `MATCH` | Source exists and supports the claim | none |
| `PARTIAL` | Source exists, supports the claim only in part or with caveats | disclosed in report, does not block |
| `MISMATCH` | Source exists but does NOT support the claim (unsupported, contradicted, or unrelated) | **blocks delivery** |
| `UNVERIFIED` | Source not found, or could not be checked (after retry) | **blocks delivery** |
| `SKIPPED` | Out of scope (informal doctrine without structured ID, spec §7) | disclosed in report, does not block |

## Verification Procedure

### Step 0: Privacy Pre-Check

Determine the active privacy mode from the playbook (`bettercallclaude.local.md`) or session state. Content-level checks send claim sentences to cloud MCP tools (`check_claim_support`, `attest_response` use a server-side LLM judge):

- **`strict` mode**: privileged content MUST NOT cross to cloud content-checks. Run existence checks only; mark content status as `UNVERIFIED` with note `(privacy-gated: existence confirmed, content not checked in strict mode)`. Optionally offer local-only review via the ollama server.
- **`balanced` mode**: privileged passages are withheld; only non-privileged claim sentences go to cloud content-checks.
- **`cloud` mode**: proceed normally.

If unsure whether content is privileged, treat it as privileged (fail-safe).

### Step 1: EXTRACT

Run `legal-citations__extract_citations` on the draft. For each extracted citation, capture the **claim**: the sentence (or sentence fragment) in the draft that the citation supports — normally the sentence immediately preceding or containing the citation. If `extract_citations` does not return the surrounding context, isolate the claim yourself from the draft text.

### Step 2: CLASSIFY & RESOLVE

Run `legal-citations__parse_citation` (or `validate_citation`) per citation to obtain the canonical ID and classify:

| Class | Examples | Route |
|-------|----------|-------|
| `statute` | Art. 97 Abs. 1 OR, art. 2 CC, Art. 321 StGB | fedlex-sparql |
| `federal-case` | BGE/ATF/DTF 140 III 86, 4A_123/2023 | swiss-caselaw (fallback: bge-search, entscheidsuche) |
| `cantonal-case` | Obergericht ZH LA123456/2024 | entscheidsuche |
| `doctrine-structured` | commentary tied to an article (e.g. onlinekommentar on Art. 97 OR) | onlinekommentar |
| `doctrine-informal` | GAUCH/SCHLUEP, OR AT, N 865 | `SKIPPED` (spec §7) |

### Step 3: ROUTE & VERIFY

For each citation, with **exactly one retry** on timeout/transient MCP error before declaring `UNVERIFIED`:

**`statute`** → `fedlex-sparql__get_article` (or `lookup_statute`).
- Not found → `UNVERIFIED`.
- Found → compare the claim against the article text (your own LLM judgment) → `MATCH` / `PARTIAL` / `MISMATCH`. `matched_snippet` = the verbatim article passage used.

**`federal-case`** → `swiss-caselaw__cite(reference, pinpoint?)`.
- `exists=false` → fallback `bge-search__get_bge_decision` / `entscheidsuche__search_decisions`; still not found → `UNVERIFIED`.
- Exists → `swiss-caselaw__check_claim_support(claim, decision_id, pinpoint?)`:
  - `yes` → `MATCH`; `partial` → `PARTIAL`; `no` / `contradicts` / `unrelated` → `MISMATCH`.
- Pinpoint present (E./consid. X.Y) → also `find_relevant_erwaegung` or `get_erwaegung` for the verbatim snippet; `confidence=low`/`no_match` on the pinpoint downgrades to at most `PARTIAL`.

**`cantonal-case`** → `entscheidsuche__get_decision_details` / `search_decisions`.
- Not found → `UNVERIFIED`. Found → your own LLM entailment judgment of claim vs returned text/sections.

**`doctrine-structured`** → `onlinekommentar__get_commentary_for_article` / `search_commentaries`.
- Not found → `UNVERIFIED`. Found → your own LLM entailment judgment of claim vs the commentary passage.

### Step 4: STRUCTURED OUTPUT

Produce one record per citation:

```json
{
  "citation_id": "BGE 140 III 86 E. 2.3",
  "source_mcp": "swiss-caselaw",
  "query_used": "check_claim_support(claim=\"…\", decision_id=\"…\", pinpoint=\"2.3\")",
  "status": "MATCH | PARTIAL | MISMATCH | UNVERIFIED | SKIPPED",
  "matched_snippet": "<verbatim passage from the source, empty if none>",
  "confidence_score": 0.0
}
```

`confidence_score` is 0–1. Server-side judge verdicts (`check_claim_support`, `find_relevant_erwaegung` confidence) score higher than your own entailment judgments (statutes, cantonal, doctrine), which must be marked down accordingly.

### Step 5: AUDIT TRAIL

Write the full report to `bcc-output/<YYYY-MM-DD-slug>/citation-verify.json` and append every consulted source to `sources.md` (per `skills/shared` output conventions). The chat output shows only a 3–5 line summary plus the report path.

### Step 6: DELIVERY GATE

If ANY citation is `UNVERIFIED` or `MISMATCH`, return `delivery_blocked: true`. The draft MUST NOT be delivered as-is. Offer exactly these options:

1. **Fix** — remove or replace the citation (and re-run this stage on the revised draft).
2. **Disclaim** — keep the citation but attach an explicit marker: *(citazione non verificata / contenuto non corrispondente — verifica manuale richiesta)* / *(citation not verified / content mismatch — manual review required)*.
3. **Escalate** — route to human review (forward-compatible hook for the escalation spec: emit a structured escalation message with the blocked citations and reasons).

`PARTIAL` and `SKIPPED` do not block but MUST be disclosed in the summary.

### Step 7: REDUCED MODE (MCP unavailable)

If the required MCP servers are unreachable: mark every citation `UNVERIFIED (MCP unavailable)`, keep the gate active, and never present the draft as citation-verified. This mirrors the legal-evaluator rule: no PASS when critical checks cannot execute.

## Summary Output Format

```
## Citation Content Verification

- Citations checked: [N]
- MATCH: [n] | PARTIAL: [n] | MISMATCH: [n] | UNVERIFIED: [n] | SKIPPED: [n]
- Delivery: [CLEAR | BLOCKED]
- Report: bcc-output/<date-slug>/citation-verify.json

[If BLOCKED: list each blocking citation with status and reason, then the three options (fix / disclaim / escalate)]
```

## Hard Rules

- Never mark `MATCH` without a real tool retrieval behind it — a `MATCH` from memory is itself the failure mode this stage exists to catch.
- One retry per citation on transient errors; no infinite retry loops.
- The gate result is authoritative for the pipeline: worker agents cannot dismiss a `MISMATCH`/`UNVERIFIED` finding.
- Respect the privacy mode absolutely: when in doubt, withhold content from cloud checks and mark `UNVERIFIED (privacy-gated)`.
- Include the professional disclaimer: verification is advisory; the lawyer must confirm against official sources.

## Integration

- Invoked by `legal-evaluator` (pre-score gate), `/legal-loop` (verdict step), the orchestrator (pre-delivery quality gate), the citation-specialist agent (Step 2.5), and `/validate` (substantive mode).
- Receives: the draft text (and optionally the active privacy mode).
- Returns: the structured per-citation report + `delivery_blocked` flag.
- Never modifies the draft itself — modifications happen via the gate options chosen by the user or the pipeline.