Why I built Pincite
Anyone who has come into contact with legal referencing knows how tedious and frustrating it can be. The rules span hundreds of pages and are often unintuitive. Whether you are a budding first-year law student or a seasoned professional finalising your PhD, the problems that come from legal referencing are universally felt.
Throughout law school I aimed for perfect referencing. Not because I enjoyed it but to get those ‘easy’ marks my tutors were telling me about. I would spend hours cross-checking and then checking again, and without fail something unexpected would still catch me out.
So I set my mind to taking the administrative burden off students. Nobody should be expected to hold all of the rules in their head. Getting it perfect by hand consistently, across an entire degree, is close to impossible, and the people who think they’ve managed it usually haven’t.
The two core principles that shaped the development of Pincite were simple. No AI tools and maximum rule coverage.
On AI
AI is a remarkable tool. I’ll be the first to admit that if you ask an AI to generate citations, most of the time what you get back is good enough.
Most of the time.
AI is by nature inconsistent. It cannot help but adjust things. Because you never really know if an output is correct, you end up checking every single citation by hand. All the benefit of saving time with AI is now given to cross-checking against the rules, and you’ll never fully feel at ease regardless.
That is why you won’t find AI tools in Pincite. Whenever AI comes into the picture it causes stress, and uncertainty even after you’ve spent your time checking it. It can never really be trusted, and the margin for error is nothing in legal referencing.
Pincite is deterministic. There is no AI to change its answer. An output that is right for one case will be right in every case.
Earning your trust
At this point you’re probably thinking okay, great, there is no AI and the answers will always be the same. So what.
The reality is that there is nothing that I can say here to make you trust Pincite. I can tell you that it’s an incredibly advanced tool. That it will fix errors you didn’t even know you made and can account for situations and edge cases that most people will never even encounter.
But that’s okay. You know that an output will always come out the same. Every reported case you have will format identically. Therefore, once you verify the output of the very first citation you make you can trust that it is correct and will continue to be correct. You only need to check it once. Not every single time like AI.
The point of all this
Referencing is just admin. It’s not what makes up your argument and it is not your analysis.
Pincite exists to make referencing easy, to reduce stress and to give you more time to do the work that really matters.
