BenchSlap is a deterministic, closed-corpus citation-verification system built by a single Utah trial attorney to make Mata v. Avianca-style fabrications architecturally impossible. Below: quotable facts, the architecture story, downloadable assets, and direct contact.
Richard L. Sanders
Utah Bar #15728 · admitted 2015
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For interviews + on-record quotes, prefer email so I can hand back verified-cite-shaped answers.
A Utah solo built the architecture that makes the Mata v. Avianca failure mode mathematically impossible to reproduce, then made the engine free for any pro se litigant and shipped a paid pilot at $59/month for solo attorneys.
Every number above can be independently re-verified. Test source: tests/placebo-controlled-verification.test.js + tests/authority-hash.test.js + tests/advocacy-algorithm.test.js. Reproducer command in the whitepaper.
Most AI legal tools follow a single shape: ask the model a question, retrieve plausibly-relevant authority, ask the model to write the brief using the retrieved material. The model still generates the citation tokens. RAG reduces hallucination rates; it does not eliminate them.
BenchSlap’s verification path does not call a model. The verification function recomputes a SHA-256 hash of the stored opinion text and compares it against a hash captured at ingest, then runs a 5-gram shingle-containment check between the AI’s claimed holding and the actual opinion text. Set membership, deterministic, decided. The hard-block matrix at lib/post-stream-gate.js:48–55 is Object.freeze’d at runtime.
The default state of the entire pipeline is: every output is a hallucination until deterministic proof grants VERIFIED. If any verification path throws an exception, the gate falls to BLOCK. Most software defaults to PASS when the verifier is unavailable. For citation verification in legal output, the inverse is the only defensible choice. Asymmetric stakes demand asymmetric defaults.
“The model can name a case. The database cannot serve a case that doesn’t exist. The verification path returns the absence.”— on why the Varghese v. China Southern Airlines fabrication fails at the retrieval layer
“Verification has to live in the workflow, not in the price tag. A bad citation that came out of Westlaw via an associate is still a bad citation when the brief gets filed.”— on why $5,000/year Westlaw doesn’t solve the underlying problem
“Most software defaults to PASS when the verifier is unavailable. For citation verification, the inverse is the only defensible choice. Asymmetric stakes demand asymmetric defaults.”— on fail-closed architecture
“The architecture has to make hallucination structurally impossible, because the user can’t afford to verify it after the fact.”— on building for the solo attorney and the pro se litigant
Structural verification: disposition / panel / treatment-graph.
Download →No signup. No card. Paste any citation:
Three sample buttons: a real cite (Strickland), an overruled cite (Plessy), and the actual fabricated cite from Mata v. Avianca (Varghese v. China Southern Airlines). Watch the system catch the third in milliseconds.
Every verification produces an HMAC-SHA256-signed JSON certificate. POST a citation to /api/verify-certificate. POST the certificate back to /api/verify-certificate/verify to confirm authenticity. Tamper the verdict and the signature no longer matches. This is the answer to the bench’s question “Counsel, what verification did you perform?”
Utah trial attorney admitted 2015 (Utah Bar #15728). Solo practice. Started building BenchSlap in 2025 after watching Mata v. Avianca drop and concluding that the AI-citation problem couldn’t be solved by asking the AI to verify itself. Currently maintaining and extending the platform single-handedly while running an active appellate and family-law caseload.
Has personally experienced stretches without access to counsel. Says publicly: “the work I’m doing is for the solo attorney who can’t afford to be sanctioned for a hallucination, and for the pro se litigant who never had the option of paying $500 a month for Westlaw.”
Pro se access is free, permanently, no contract, after a sworn affidavit at benchslap.com/pro-se.
If a number, a quote, or an architectural claim in this kit is going to appear in your story and you want a 15-minute walkthrough with the source code on screen, just reply to the contact email above. I can show every layer to a screen-share, including the placebo-controlled experiments running live. The whole system is open-source.