Why every citation carries a quote you can check

A citation is a promise that a document exists, that it says something, and that it says it in a particular place. Checking that promise is a few minutes of work. Doing it for eight citations, in an advice you are already late on, is an afternoon.

So the agent does not hand you a citation it has not already opened.

The rule

An answer may cite only what was read, quoted and checked in that chat.

Not "in a similar chat". Not "in training". Each verified passage is a durable row: this document, under this line of enquiry, is directly or analogically relevant for this reason, supported by this exact quote at this pinpoint. That record is the only thing an answer is allowed to draw on.

How a passage earns its way in

1. The document is opened — a judgment from the Legal Reference System, or a chapter from Hong Kong e-Legislation.
2. A short supporting quote is proposed, and the server checks it appears in the source verbatim. Not paraphrased, not approximately. If it does not appear, nothing is recorded, and the failure comes back with the real surrounding text to copy from.
3. The pinpoint is derived by code, from where the quote actually sits: the court's own paragraph number for a judgment, and for legislation, whichever provision spans that offset — the corpus decides, not the model.
4. The citation is then assembled from corpus rows. The URL comes from the document record, never from something a model half-remembers. A guessed link 404s in front of a lawyer.

The answer has no way to say anything else

When the answer is written, it is not allowed to write case numbers, pinned chapter references or URLs at all. It writes placeholders — [E1], [E2] — against a list of verified passages that code assigned. Code then expands the placeholders into the real citations.

What cannot be expressed cannot be shipped.

A fabricated citation is not caught late by this design. It is unavailable.

Then it is checked again anyway

The finished answer is held back before you see it, and audited.

Every case number and every chapter reference in the text is found, matched against what the ledger holds, and dealt with:

• If the answer shows a quote for a citation that was not verified, the quote is grounded against the source there and then, and the citation becomes verified.
• If there is nothing checkable, a small verifier agent is sent to that one document with the answer's own claim: this pinpoint, this quote — is it right?
• If a pinpoint is wrong, it is corrected to the one in the record.
• If a citation still cannot be verified, it is labelled in the text: (unverified — not checked against the corpus this chat), or (not found in the corpus).

The labelling matters more than the repair. The guarantee is not "every citation is verified" — it is that no unverified citation reaches you dressed as a verified one.

Finally, every verified authority is collected into a References list with its pinpoints, so you can work through them without re-reading the answer:

**References**

- [Cap. 132](https://…) — s. 105H, s. 105I
- [FACV 5/2011](https://…) — at [45]

What a verified citation does not mean

It means: this document is in our certified copy, this passage is in it, word for word, at this place.

It does not mean the case is good law, that a later court has not distinguished it, that it is the best authority on the point, or that it applies to your facts. Those are the parts you are paid for, and none of them are checkable by string comparison.

None of this is legal advice, creates a solicitor–client relationship, or replaces reading the authorities.