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Citators (Westlaw / Lexis)

Commercial citators

Pollen8 Legal can pull treatment signals (“good law”, “criticized”, “overruled”) on every cited authority by integrating with Westlaw KeyCite and/or Lexis+ Shepard’s. Configure at /admin/legal/citators.

How treatment signals work

The aggregator normalizes each provider’s native flag onto a five-value scale:

Pollen8 signalWestlaw KeyCiteLexis Shepard’s
goodGreen flagA (approved), F (followed)
cautionYellow flag / OrangeD, Q, L
negativeRed — criticizedC (criticized)
overruledRed — overruled / reversedO, R, S (superseded)
unknownFound, no signalFound, no signal

CourtListener is consulted last as a free fallback — it only confirms existence, never a treatment signal.

Configuration

Both Westlaw and Lexis require paid API contracts with the respective vendor. Pollen8 does not resell access — you bring your firm’s API credentials.

For each provider:

  1. Open /admin/legal/citatorsAdd provider.
  2. Pick Westlaw or Lexis+.
  3. Paste the API key (and Client ID for Westlaw, or Consumer Key for Lexis).
  4. Set a priority number — lower = consulted first.
  5. Save → click Ping to send a known-good citation (Marbury v. Madison) and confirm the credentials work.

Credentials are stored via secret_box (Fernet) — the same envelope encryption Pollen8 uses for AI provider keys and DMS tokens.

Ad-hoc verify

The right panel on /admin/legal/citators takes a single Bluebook- formatted citation and returns the signal + source URL — useful for quickly cross-checking a citation the AI drafter produced.

Where it shows up

  • AI Drafter (matter detail) — runs the verifier on every citation in the generated draft. Results render advisory, never blocking — the verifier is opinionated but doesn’t gate output.
  • Word add-in — the Verify citations action sweeps the current selection through legal_citators.verify_many.
  • Slack/Teams bots — citation answers automatically include the signal where the underlying retrieval surfaced a verdict.