The California Style Manual service
Paste Bluebook or ALWD case citations — one at a time, as a list, or inside an uploaded document — and get California Style Manual (4th ed.) citations enriched with the official reporter volume and page your trial-court memorandum needs under CRC 3.1113(c). Already writing in CSM? Paste it and we'll check it.
An example conversion
Example — not liveA regional-reporter cite, the way Westlaw hands it to you
The CSM result
Official cite 13 Cal.3d 804 added via CourtListener lookup
Not legal advice. Always verify citations against primary authority.
CRC 3.1113(c) requires trial-court memoranda to cite the official report volume and page — whichever citation style you use. Citations copied from Westlaw or Lexis usually carry only regional reporter cites. We look the case up and add the official California citation.
Paste CSM citations and get them back normalized to the 4th edition, with a before-and-after list of what we fixed: reporter spacing, pinpoint form, stray punctuation. Short forms (supra, id., ibid.) come with every full citation.
Output is binary: a citation renders, or we tell you plainly why it didn't and what to paste instead. No guessed volumes, no invented pages, no confidence scores. A refusal costs you seconds; a wrong citation in a filing costs more.
Noland v. Land of the Free, L.P. (2025) 114 Cal.App.5th 426 is the first published California opinion on AI-fabricated citations: a $10,000 sanction, with the opinion served on the State Bar. In Lacey v. State Farm (C.D. Cal., order of May 5, 2025), a filing drafted with paid legal-AI tools drew $31,100 in sanctions.
No tool can make a filing sanction-proof, and we don't claim to. What CiteCSM does is mechanical: every case citation is matched through a verified CourtListener lookup before the official reporter cite is added, every Court of Appeal result carries a publication-status notice (CRC 8.1115), and when we can't confidently match a case we refuse and tell you why. Verifying your authorities is still your job — this tool's job is to never hand you a citation it made up.
No — and we won't tell you it is. California Rule of Court 1.200 lets you cite using either the California Style Manual or the Bluebook, as long as you're consistent. What is required in trial-court memoranda is the official report volume and page for published California cases (CRC 3.1113(c)). That's the piece citations copied from Westlaw or Lexis usually lack, and it's the piece we add.
Only when you're signed in. Without an account, what you paste or upload is processed transiently and never stored. When you're signed in, your conversions are saved to your History — you set how long (0–90 days) and can delete them anytime.
No. CiteCSM has no citator and never shows validity indicators. We format citations and add the official reporter cite; checking precedential and publication status stays your job. Every Court of Appeal result carries a reminder to check before filing (CRC 8.1115).
Cases (lookup-assisted), statutes, regulations, constitutions, rules of court, treatises, journals, websites, videos, and news — all output in CSM 4th ed. form, with short forms generated from any full citation.
No. CiteCSM is an independent service — not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Judicial Council of California, the Reporter of Decisions, or the publisher of the printed California Style Manual. "The California Style Manual service" describes what this site covers — CSM 4th ed. citation formatting — not who we are.