COAPP - Legal Brief Generator

The Challenge

Drafting an appellate brief is days of structured writing across 11 mandatory C.A.R. 32 sections, with every citation pulled from the record.

Generic AI tools hallucinate citations, which is a sanctionable mistake in court. Litigators wanted speed without the malpractice risk.

Our Solution

COAPP generates each section against the rules, validates every citation against documents the firm uploaded, and refuses to invent sources.

A pre-generation risk assessment tells the attorney what's weak before the draft exists, so the brief comes back ready to argue, not ready to apologize for.

What We Built

• Generation of all 11 required C.A.R. 32 sections.
• Automated citation validation against uploaded record documents.
• Pre-generation risk assessment that surfaces weak arguments early.
• Enterprise security with role-based access for firm staff.
• No hallucinated citations — every reference traceable to source.

The Approach — What We Weighed

Everything hinged on one rule: a brief that cites a case that doesn't exist is sanctionable, so the citation layer — not the drafting — drove the design.

Options on the table

• Prompt a general-purpose LLM with strong instructions not to invent cites — cheapest, but hallucinated authority is exactly the malpractice risk attorneys feared.
• Keep drafting fully manual and use AI only to summarize — safe, but it hands back none of the days the firm wanted to save.
• Ground every section in the firm's uploaded record and validate each citation against those documents before the draft is returned.

What we proposed

We proposed the grounded, validated path. C.A.R. 32 structure is deterministic, so the model drafts against the rules while every reference is checked against source documents the firm supplied — anything unverifiable is refused, not guessed. That let us collapse first-draft time from a week to a working session while keeping output court-ready and traceable, which no prompt-only tool could promise. The pre-generation risk assessment falls out of the same grounding — weak arguments surface before the draft exists.

Results & Value Delivered

Days to minutes

First-draft turnaround on a brief shrinks from a week to a working session.

Zero invented citations

Every cite is anchored to a real document the firm uploaded.

Court-ready output

Output respects C.A.R. 32 structure so attorneys edit, not rebuild.

Capabilities Used