Work · Legal
incitez: the trusted citation
standard, verified — and faster.
eyecite is the de-facto standard for extracting legal citations (it powers CourtListener and the Caselaw Access Project). incitez matches it — verified — runs ~31× faster warm on a full brief (~64× for a typical one-shot run), and attributes parties more accurately where a document’s structure is reliable. The restraint is the point: parity first, then speed, then the places we can honestly do better.
Citation-for-citation match with eyecite on a real appellate brief, backed by a 215/215 differential gate in CI. Not “looks close” — mechanically verified. Cite-agreement held at 2,160 vs 2,159 across a 1.7 MB corpus — the speed isn’t bought with worse recall.
A typical one-shot run of a ~90-page appellate brief: incitez ~30 ms vs eyecite re-paying ~170 ms of Python/model startup every time. Warm and engine-only it’s ~31× (31.6 ms vs 987 ms); the margin grows with brief size and citation density.
On a real appellate brief in the browser demo: 350 citations, 183 cleanly-attributed parties, versus naive extraction’s 324 citations and 0 parties.
The honest frame
incitez doesn’t claim to beat the standard everywhere — it claims to match it, verifiably, and then do better only where it legitimately can.
- Raw PDF text: the same citations eyecite finds — ~31× faster warm on a full brief, ~64× for a one-shot run.
- Where structure is reliable (e.g. a
TABLE OF AUTHORITIESwith a clean party line): incitez attributes the party correctly — “Albritton” as plaintiff — where naive extraction bleeds the heading into the name (“TABLE OF AUTHORITIES … Albritton”). - Where structure isn’t reliable: incitez stays at parity rather than guessing. The surpass is offered only where it holds up.
How it’s verified
Every build runs incitez and eyecite against the same corpus and fails CI on any divergence — a differential oracle, not a hand-picked demo. It’s MFIC — the same discipline Mecha applies across its work: a check the author can’t quietly pass with wrong output. For a legal audience, that’s the difference between “trust me” and “here’s the gate.”
See it on a real brief
Paste or load an appellate brief and watch citations and attributed parties resolve live, in the browser, on a WebAssembly build of the engine.
Try the live demo →Under the hood
A pure Zig core (no I/O) → a C FFI boundary → native CLI and a WebAssembly module — the same engine in the terminal head-to-head and in the browser demo. Citation grammar and reporter data derive from the Free Law Project (reporters-db, courts-db, eyecite), used under their BSD 2-Clause terms.
Source availability: incitez is source-available under the Business Source License (BUSL-1.1) — read, build, and run the source; it converts to open source on a delay. View the source on GitHub →