Introducing Smart Citator: Pioneering an AI-Powered Citation Index for African Case Laws

Today marks a historic milestone in legal technology as we launch Smart Citator, the AI-powered citator for African jurisdictions, beginning with Ghana. While legal professionals in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom have long relied on established citation services such as Shepard’s from LexisNexis and KeyCite from Westlaw, African jurisdictions have lacked these essential tools — until now.

Bridging a Critical Gap in Legal Research

For decades, citators have been fundamental to legal research in developed markets to determine whether a statute or case law is good law, with services like Shepard's and KeyCite serving as indispensable tools. However, legal professionals across Africa have had to navigate the complex relationships between legal precedents without comparable resources. The databases underlying these traditional citators were manually curated, a resource-intensive task that made them very expensive to maintain. A recent study from the William & Mary Law School showed that these established citators miss or mislabel about 33% of the 357 negative citing relationships that were sampled, highlighting the risk of errors in this manual curation process.

We leveraged recent advances in Generative AI to build Smart Citator, a citator that addresses the cost and accuracy limitations of traditional citators. Starting with coverage of Ghanaian case law, Smart Citator also fills a critical gap in legal research resources for African jurisdictions. Having built and launched Africa’s first AI legal assistant, we continue to innovate by making Smart Citator available through Eskwai.

Advanced Judicial Treatment Analysis

At the heart of Smart Citator is our judicial treatment analysis system, which classifies the cited case or precedent into one of the following categories:

• Positive: When a court applies principles established in the cited case to evaluate the issues of the current case without modifying or refining those principles. This indicates the strongest form of validation, where the legal reasoning in the cited case directly shapes the outcome of the current case.
• Caution: Applied in two key scenarios:
  • When a court distinguishes legal principles from the cited case due to factual differences or distinct legal issues, and therefore does not apply it to the current case.
  • When a court modifies any principle from the cited case to reflect evolving legal standards, and societal values, or to address flaws in the original reasoning.
• Negative: Indicates that same-level or higher courts have either found the precedent's underlying principles legally erroneous or determined the precedent has been superseded by new legislation or legal developments.
• Neutral: Identifies citations that appear in court judgments but do not form part of the core legal reasoning or final decision.

Understanding the Context: Reasoning and Passage Analysis

Smart Citator goes beyond simple categorization by providing vital context for each citation:

• Relevant Passages: For every citation, we extract the specific passage from the citing case that demonstrates how the precedent was treated, allowing you to quickly understand the context and implications and verify the judicial treatment.
• Reasoning Explanation: Smart Citator also provides clear, concise explanations for each treatment classification, helping you understand precisely why a precedent was applied, distinguished, modified, or rejected.

Robust Technical Evaluation

We evaluated Smart Citator on an internal benchmark of curated cases which were labelled by an experienced lawyer to establish its robustness. Smart Citator demonstrated an overall balanced accuracy of 82%. ‍

The confusion matrix below shows how well Smart Citator predicts the judicial treatments (caution, positive, neutral, and negative). Let's clarify the meaning of scores in the confusion matrix to interpret these results effectively. Each row represents the judicial treatment assigned by the expert, and each column represents the judicial treatment predicted by Smart Citator. The numbers in each box represent the percentage of instances where a true label (row) was predicted as a certain category (column). Darker colors indicate a higher percentage of instances in that box.

• Caution: 71% of actual "caution" instances were correctly predicted as "caution," but 29% were misclassified as "positive".
• Positive: 100% of actual "positive" instances were correctly predicted, with no misclassifications.
• Neutral: For "neutral," Smart Citator had a mix of correct predictions (56%) and errors, where it predicted "neutral" as "caution" or "positive" (22% each).
• Negative: 100% of actual "negative" instances were correctly predicted, with no misclassifications.

Overall, these results indicate that for positive and negative judicial treatments - arguably the most important for lawyers - Smart Citator gives very robust and reliable predictions.

Limitations

Currently, Smart Citator is available for a limited number of cases in our Ghanaian database. We are working to increase this coverage over the coming months to all cases in our database. Also, as shown in our evaluation results, caution and neutral treatments are currently not 100% accurate. We are working to improve the accuracy for those categories as well.

Looking Ahead

The launch of Smart Citator represents more than just a new legal technology product — it is a step toward democratizing access to sophisticated legal research tools across Africa. We are committed to:

• Continuous expansion of coverage to additional African jurisdictions
• Development of features specific to African legal systems
• Collaboration with local legal communities to ensure our tools meet their unique needs
• Training and support programs to help legal professionals maximize the benefits of this new technology

Get Started Today

Smart Citator is now available to all subscribers on the Eskwai Pro Plan and Eskwai Firm Plans. Existing users can access the new features immediately through our platform. New users can sign up here for a free trial of our Pro Plan to experience how Smart Citator can transform their legal research practice.

Legal research is evolving, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this transformation. Try Smart Citator today and experience the future of legal research!