The words, defined.

Terms · defined once

1. Hallucination Output that is presented as fact and is not supported by anything the system actually consulted, from an invented case to a real case described wrongly. In a filing it is the sentence a judge checks first, and the one that puts your name in an order to show cause. What a citation gate is
2. Fabricated citation A citation to an authority that does not exist: no case at that reporter and page, no statute at that section. It is the failure courts have sanctioned most often, and the only one a plain lookup can catch. The sanctions record
3. Misgrounded citation A citation to a real authority that does not support the proposition attached to it. The term comes from the Stanford RegLab evaluation of legal research tools. It survives the check a busy reader performs: click the cite, see a real case, move on. Why retrieval does not stop hallucination
4. Retrieval-augmented generation A design that searches a corpus first and puts the retrieved passages into the prompt, so the model writes with documents in front of it. Usually shortened to RAG. It improves what the model reads. The sentence that cites the document is still generated afterwards. Why retrieval does not stop hallucination
5. Grounding The relation between a statement and the specific passage that supports it, rather than the general subject it is about. A memo is grounded when every line can be traced to an exhibit page, a transcript timestamp, or a reported holding. How it works
6. Citation gate A check that runs on a finished draft and asks two questions of every authority in it: does the authority exist, and does it hold what the sentence says it holds. A gate that asks only the first question hands back the harder half of the job while looking like it finished. What a citation gate is
7. Existence check Resolving a citation to one specific document. It either resolves or it does not. It is a lookup, so a machine can do it exhaustively, and you should never spend an evening doing it by hand. How to check an AI citation
8. Support check Reading the cited passage and deciding whether it carries the proposition the writer hung on it. This is where the interesting failures are, and it is the check that keeps a real case from standing for something it never said. How to check an AI citation
9. Provenance The record of where a statement came from: which document, which page, which timestamp, and by what step it got into the draft. It turns review into a spot check, because you can see what a line rests on without rebuilding the reasoning. The proof page
10. Render gating Deciding whether a line may appear at all, rather than flagging it after it appears. Apodicta uses the term for its own last step before output. A warning label on a printed sentence still leaves the sentence in the document you are about to file. How it works
11. Quarantine In Apodicta, where a claim goes when it fails a gate: pulled out of the draft, labelled, and shown with the reason, rather than deleted or printed. What the system could not prove is often the thing you most need to know it looked at. How it works
12. Fail-closed A policy under which the absence of proof stops the output, rather than being treated as permission to proceed. It is the difference between a checker that costs a vendor nothing and one that can tell you your motion is not ready. How it works
13. Deterministic Producing the same output from the same input, every time, by rule rather than by sampling. A model at temperature zero is not deterministic in practice, so ask which part of the system the word describes. What deterministic means
14. Reductio Testing a theory by looking for the fact that makes it impossible. Apodicta runs each hypothesis against the record for contradiction, which is reductio ad absurdum in code. A defense theory that dies on a timestamp should die in the workup, not at the hearing. How it works
15. Hearing memo A memo written for one setting on the calendar: what the hearing decides, what the record says about it, and what counsel needs in hand. It is the document that turns a docket entry into a prepared appearance, and it is usually written at night. What a hearing memo is
16. Pretrial conference memo The filing a court asks for before a pretrial conference, listing the matters to be resolved. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 17.1 allows the conference; local rules set the contents. It is where stipulations, disclosure disputes, and evidentiary objections are pinned down before trial. What a hearing memo is
17. Bates number The unique number stamped on each page of a produced document set, used to cite discovery precisely. It is the address a claim about the record has to carry, the way a case cite carries a reporter and a page. For defenders
18. Local model A model whose weights run on hardware you control, with no request leaving the network to produce an answer. It is the configuration in which a client file stays inside the office, under your own retention policy. On-premise AI for law firms
19. On-premise Software installed on machines in your building rather than reached over the internet as a service. It changes who can be served with process for your files, and what a vendor outage does to your calendar. Client data and local models
20. Frontier model One of the largest current models, reached through a provider API and run on the provider hardware. It is usually the strongest drafter available, and the one whose terms of use you have to read before a client file goes near it. Any model
21. Enforcement boundary The line between the part of a system that may propose anything and the part that decides what is allowed out. Apodicta puts its rules on the second side, outside the model. Guarantees written inside a prompt move when the model moves; guarantees written in code outside it do not. Any model