As I wrote about Descrybe last year<\/a>, it was founded by a Boston-area husband and wife team, Kara Peterson<\/a> and Richard DiBona<\/a>, whose own experience with the legal system inspired them to create a free legal research platform with the goal of democratizing access to legal information.\u00a0<\/p>\n They used AI to generate summaries and abstracts of court opinions and make them searchable. Last October, they rolled out a major upgrade<\/a> that included a redesign of its platform, more nuanced and accurate search results, summaries of judicial opinions in Spanish as well as English, and simplified, plain-language summaries in both English and Spanish.<\/p>\n Descrybe was also a finalist this year in the ABA Techshow Startup Alley<\/a> that I oversee.<\/p>\n Descrybe will continue to offer a free version. Everything that was free remains free, Peterson told me. The paid upgrade it is introducing today adds a number of features that will make it a more attractive legal research option for legal professionals. These features, packaged as Descrybe\u2019s Legal Research Toolkit, include:<\/p>\n They have kept the cost of this upgraded version extremely affordable. Access for non-commercial use is $10 a month. For commercial use (such as by a lawyer), it is just $20 a month.<\/p>\n I have written before about development of a robust and reliable citator as the holy grail of legal research platforms<\/a>. While two products long dominated the market as the gold standard of citators, Shepard\u2019s from LexisNexis and and KeyCite from Westlaw, virtually every other legal research services has sought to build its own citator.<\/p>\n Last year, for example, I wrote about the launch by Paxton AI<\/a> of its\u00a0Paxton AI Citator<\/a>, as well as the launch by vLex<\/a>\u00a0of its citator, called Cert. I also recently wrote about Decisis<\/a>, the legal research platform targeting bar associations, and its simple citator.\u00a0<\/p>\n Descrybe\u2019s citator promises to do something that these others do not, which is to show not only the subsequent treatment of a case, but also the case\u2019s \u201cbackwards\u201d treatment, meaning how it analyzed the cases it cited.<\/p>\n Descrybe gave me advance access a few days ago to test the new citator and the other paid features. I was intrigued, because getting a citator right is not easy. For example, a 2018 study by a law librarian<\/a> found that both Shepard\u2019s and KeyCite missed or mislabeled about a third of negative citing relationships. The study found that Bloomberg\u2019s BCite performed even worse, missing or mislabeling over tw0-thirds of negative treatments.<\/p>\n Given that, I was intrigued to try Descrybe\u2019s Cytator.<\/p>\n Now when a paid subscriber conducts a search in Descrybe, the cases listed in the results are flagged with colored icons much like you would see with other citators: green for positive, red for negative, yellow for cautionary, black for neutral, and others.<\/p>\n Click on a search result, and you get a collection of tabs across the top that provide various forms of information about the case. (The available tabs seem to vary with the case.) Tabs include:<\/p>\n Among legal research companies and legal research professionals, a common issue of discussion is whether human editors are required to ensure the accuracy of a citator or whether AI can achieve comparable (or better) degrees of accuracy.<\/p>\n I cannot claim to have conducted exhaustive testing of the Cytator, but my experience was that it appeared to be generally correct in its identification of subsequent treatments.<\/p>\n That said, it did not take me long to find instances where it was not correct. As I said above, no citator is perfect, and the examples I found were ones where there was ambiguity in the citation.<\/p>\n For example, in the case Kourouvacilis v. General Motors Corp.<\/em><\/a>, 410 Mass. 706, 575 N.E.2d 734 (1991), Descrybe\u2019s backward citator shows that the case expressed caution about an earlier Massachusetts case, King v. Globe Newspaper<\/em><\/a>, 400 Mass. 705, 512 N.R. 2nd 241 (1987). By the same token, the Cytator treatment of King<\/em> shows a yellow caution flag for the Kourouvacilis<\/em> case.<\/p>\n In fact, however, Kourouvacilis<\/em> cited King<\/em> positively in support of a proposition of law and that should have been reflected with a green flag. But the placement of the citation could have caused confusion for the AI, and possibly even for a human editor. Here is the quote:<\/p>\n \u201cWe are in substantial agreement not only with the result reached by the motion judge but also with his reasoning. As we have previously observed, we are not bound to apply the summary judgment standard articulated by the United States Supreme Court in Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, supra. King v. Globe Newspaper Co., 400 Mass. 705, 719 (1987), cert. denied, 485 U.S. 940 & 962 (1988). However, we think it makes eminent good sense to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The court is citing King<\/em> in support of the proposition that it is not bound to apply the summary judgment standard of Celotex<\/em>. It is affirming its statement in the King<\/em> case that it, as a Massachusetts court, is not bound to follow Celotex<\/em>.<\/p>\n So, based on my limited testing, it is hard to extrapolate too broadly. But it suggests that there will be instances where ambiguity in the test will lead to incorrect flagging of subsequent (and prior) treatments.<\/p>\n One other issue with the Cytator currently is that I came across a fair number of cases that had no treatments, either of subsequent or backwards citations.<\/p>\n I asked Descrybe about this and they said it is simply a matter of delays in loading all the new data. They said that all the cases should have Cytator treatments within a few weeks.<\/p>\n\n
Citator as Holy Grail<\/h3>\n
The Cytator<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lawnext.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Screenshot-2025-06-25-114137.png?resize=812%2C464&ssl=1\" "\\"\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n
Not Perfect<\/h3>\n
\n
Brief Checker<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lawnext.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Screenshot-2025-06-25-111907-300x184.png?resize=300%2C184&ssl=1\" "\\"\\"")
<\/a>Although I did not have extensive time this week to test out all of Descrybe\u2019s new features, I did also try its Brief Checker, which allows you to check the citations in a brief.<\/p>\n