Citations

Recall handles citations in two ways:

1. In-document detection — Recall scans the text of every uploaded PDF for existing citations (full, short form, Id., supra) and stores them for reference and Table-of-Authorities building.
2. Generation — Recall produces correctly formatted citations for documents you insert into Word (from pins or Clerk), using each document's citation metadata and the matter's citation style.

Citation styles

Each matter has a citation style. Recall currently supports two:

Style	Description
federal	Standard Bluebook federal practice formatting. Default for new matters.
california	California Style Manual conventions.

Set the style when you create a matter or change it later in the matter's edit dialog. The style applies to every citation Recall generates for that matter.

What Recall detects inside documents

After a document finishes semantic indexing, Recall runs a background citation extraction pass. The extractor produces one record per citation occurrence, typed as one of:

Type	What it is	Example
full_case	Complete case citation	Smith v. Jones, 123 F.3d 456, 460 (9th Cir. 2024)
short_case	Short-form case reference	Smith, 123 F.3d at 790
supra	Reference to earlier full citation	Smith, supra, at 795
id	Id./Ibid. reference	Id. at 458.
law	Statute citation	42 U.S.C. § 1983
journal	Law review citation	Jane Doe, The Law, 100 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (2020)

Each detected citation stores whatever it has — volume, reporter, page, court, year, party name, pinpoint, code and section for statutes, author/journal/title for journal articles. Id. and supra citations carry an antecedent link back to the original full citation, so you can trace an Id. at 458 back to the case it's referring to.

Citations are extracted sentence-by-sentence using a legal sentence segmenter plus the reporter pattern engine. Overlapping matches are deduplicated by priority.

These citations feed the Table of Authorities flow (see below) and are visible in the document's in-document citation list.

What Recall generates for you

When you insert a pin or a document reference into Word, Recall builds the citation at insertion time from the document's structured metadata. The formatting matches the matter's citation style.

The formatted output is returned with italic range metadata (italicStart, italicLength) so Recall can italicize case names and journal article titles correctly inside Word.

Italic ranges by document type:

Document type	Italicized
Case law (courtOpinion, westlawOpinion, lexisOpinion)	Case name
Law review (lawReview)	Article title
Book/treatise (bookOrTreatise)	Book title
Statutes, records, transcripts, briefs	Nothing

Citation metadata on documents

Recall tries to auto-extract citation metadata when you upload a PDF. You can edit any field in the document's metadata editor — kind, case name, volume, reporter, first page, court, year, docket/WL number, title, section, author, journal, edition, description, filing date, document type.

If auto-extraction gets it wrong, fix the fields and re-insert. Generated citations always use the current metadata.

Context-aware citations

For pins, Recall can generate a citation that factors in what you cited recently in the surrounding text:

• First citation of an authority → full form
• Subsequent citations to the same authority → short form
• Consecutive citations to the same pin → Id. (with pinpoint if different)

Use this when you want Recall to pick the right form automatically. It's available as the Context-aware citation option when inserting a pin into Word.

Id. resolution

When Recall detects Id. inside a document, it links the Id. to its antecedent full citation. The extracted record carries antecedentId pointing at the full citation earlier in the same document. Short-form and supra citations work the same way.

This is used for:

• Understanding what a string of Id. at X actually refers to
• Building a de-duplicated Table of Authorities

Table of Authorities

Recall can generate a Table of Authorities for a Word document. Workflow:

1. With Word open and connected, invoke the Table-of-Authorities action (see Word Integration).
2. Recall scans the Word document's text for citations it already knows about (from your matter's documents) or can parse.
3. It groups them into sections — Cases, Statutes, Other Authorities — and produces a formatted list per your matter's citation style.
4. Insert the table into Word at your cursor position.

Section breakdown:

Section	Contents
Federal Cases	Cases in federal reporters (F., F.2d, F.3d, U.S., etc.)
State Cases	Cases in state reporters
Federal Statutes	U.S.C., C.F.R., federal constitutional provisions
State Statutes	State codes
Other Authorities	Law reviews, treatises, and anything else

The table is static once inserted — if you add or remove citations in Word afterwards, regenerate the table.

What Recall doesn't do

• No Bluebook compliance checking. Recall formats citations, but it doesn't tell you a citation is malformed. Garbage in, garbage out.
• No custom style editors. If you need a style outside federal or california, there's currently no way to define it.
• No out-of-matter references. Recall's citation generation operates on documents inside the current matter. It doesn't reach out to Westlaw or Lexis.