Citator: Check If a Case Is Still Good Law With KeyCite, Shepard's, or a Free Option
A citator answers one question: has a later court reversed, overruled, or criticized this case. Here is what each citator costs, which one your bar may already give you free, and how to run the check properly.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
In short
A citator is the tool that tells you whether a case is still good law. You enter a citation, and it reports the case's direct history along with every later decision that cited it, flagged where a court overruled, superseded, criticized, or distinguished it. The three main US citators are KeyCite on Westlaw, Shepard's on LexisNexis, and BCite on Bloomberg Law, all sold on quote-only contracts. Authority Check, through a Fastcase or vLex library, is free with many state bar memberships and is the option most lawyers already have and forget about. Casetext's SmartCite retired with Casetext on April 1, 2025 and has no self-serve successor. Cases is not a citator: it finds the on-point precedent and gives you a real citation to run through one. This is informational research, not legal advice.
Last updated July 2026
Every good-law option, priced
Citators compared: KeyCite, Shepard's, BCite, and the free routes
Three of these are quote-only, which is why so many solos never buy one. Before you assume you need to, check whether your state bar already includes the fourth.
| Citator | Platform | Cost | How it signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| KeyCiteThe Westlaw standard. Overruling Risk added on the Edge tier. | Westlaw | Quote only | Flag system: red, yellow, blue |
| Shepard'sOrganizes citing references by jurisdiction and court. | LexisNexis | Quote only | Signals: red stop, yellow triangle, green |
| BCiteBundled with the Bloomberg Law subscription. | Bloomberg Law | Quote only | Composite analysis and direct history |
| Authority CheckOften already included in your bar dues. Check yours first. | Fastcase / vLex | Free via many state bars | Citing-reference counts and Bad Law Bot |
| SmartCiteWent away with Casetext. Its work now sits inside Westlaw KeyCite. | Casetext | Retired | Discontinued April 1, 2025 |
| Subsequent history, read manuallyViable for low-stakes checks. Slow, and easy to miss a case. | CourtListener, Google Scholar, GovInfo | Free | None, you read the citing cases yourself |
| Casesthis siteFinds the on-point precedent and gives you the citation to run through a citator. | Cases | 29 dollars per month, published | None, this is not a citator |
Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg Law publish no rates, so any figure you see quoted for them is a third-party estimate. Confirm coverage and pricing with each vendor before you rely on it.
Do it properly, not just quickly
How to run a citator check on a case
Confirm you have the right citation
A citator check on the wrong citation is worse than no check, because it gives you false confidence. Verify the reporter volume, page, court, and year against the opinion itself before you validate anything. Parallel citations and unofficial reporters are a common source of the mistake, particularly with older state decisions that appear in both a regional reporter and a state reporter.
Read the direct history first
Direct history is what happened to this case on its own way up: affirmed, reversed, vacated, remanded, cert granted or denied. That is a different question from how other courts later treated it, and it is the one that most often kills a case outright. A decision reversed on appeal is not authority, no matter how well the reasoning reads.
Open the flagged citing references, do not stop at the symbol
The flag is an index, not an answer. A red flag tells you some court somewhere treated some part of the opinion negatively; it does not tell you which part. Long opinions get flagged for holdings that have nothing to do with why you are citing the case. Open the negative citing references and read what was actually said about the specific proposition you plan to rely on.
Weight the treatment by jurisdiction
Not every negative citation carries the same weight. A decision from a court that binds you overruling the case is fatal; a district court in another circuit criticizing it is a signal to be careful and maybe to address it in your brief, not a reason to drop the case. Shepard's sorts citing references by jurisdiction and court, which makes this step considerably faster.
What the research actually shows
Citators disagree with each other more than you would expect
The most useful published study on this remains Paul Hellyer's, in volume 110 of the Law Library Journal (2018). It reviewed 357 citing relationships that at least one citator had labeled negative, and compared how Shepard's, KeyCite, and BCite handled them. Shepard's and KeyCite each missed or mislabeled about a third of the negative citing relationships. BCite missed or mislabeled more than two thirds. Serious errors turned up in all three.
The practical takeaway is not that citators are useless. They are the best tool available and you should use one. It is that a clean flag is not proof, and that the two market leaders disagree often enough that checking both catches negative treatment either one alone would miss. If a case is load-bearing in a brief, and you have access to more than one platform, run it through both.
This is also the reason Cases shows a real citation on every result instead of a summary you are expected to trust. Courts have sanctioned lawyers for briefs built on cases that no longer stood, and on cases an AI tool invented outright. Our note on where AI legal research goes wrong covers those cases in detail. Find the authority with whatever tool is fastest, then verify it in the official reporter and validate it in a citator. Those are separate steps, and skipping the second is what gets people sanctioned.
For former Casetext users
What to use now that SmartCite is gone
SmartCite was Casetext's citator, and for a lot of solos it was the only affordable good-law check on the market. It retired with the rest of Casetext on April 1, 2025, about eighteen months after Thomson Reuters bought the company for 650 million dollars. The capability did not vanish; it moved. Former Casetext users are routed to Westlaw and CoCounsel Legal, where validation runs through the KeyCite flag system instead.
That is a meaningfully larger purchase than the one those users signed up for, and there is no honest way to dress it up. If good-law validation is non-negotiable for your practice, and your bar does not include a Fastcase or vLex library, you are looking at an incumbent contract. Check the bar benefit first, because a surprising number of lawyers pay for something their dues already cover. Our Casetext replacement comparison walks through which former Casetext feature maps to which tool now, and the legal research platforms comparison shows which vendors publish a rate at all.
Where Cases fits is the other half of the workflow. It does not validate cases and does not claim to. It finds them: ask the question in plain English, get on-point US federal and state precedents back as headnote cards with the holding surfaced and a citation you can take straight into whichever citator you have access to. Splitting the two jobs is often cheaper than buying one platform that does both adequately.
Questions researchers ask
Citators and good law, answered
What is a citator in legal research?
A citator is a tool that shows you every later document citing a case and tells you how those later courts treated it, so you can tell whether the case is still good law. Enter a citation and the citator reports the direct history (appeals, reversals, vacaturs) and the citing references that followed, flagged for negative treatment such as overruled, superseded, criticized, or distinguished. Shepard's, KeyCite, and BCite are the three main US citators.
How do I check if a case is still good law?
Run the citation through a citator and read the result rather than trusting the color of the flag. Check the direct history first to confirm the decision was not reversed or vacated on appeal, then read the negatively flagged citing cases to see whether the criticism touches the specific holding you are relying on or some unrelated part of the opinion. A case can carry a red flag and still be perfectly good law for your point.
How do you tell if a case is still good law on Westlaw?
On Westlaw, look at the KeyCite flag beside the case name and then open the KeyCite tab rather than stopping at the flag. A red flag means the case is no longer good law for at least one point, a yellow flag means some negative treatment exists, and a blue-striped flag indicates a pending appeal. The flag alone does not tell you which holding was affected, so read the flagged citing references before you rely on the case.
How do you tell if a case is still good law on Lexis?
On LexisNexis, check the Shepard's signal next to the citation and then open the full Shepard's report. A red stop sign means strong negative treatment, a yellow triangle means questionable treatment, an orange square means questioned validity, and a green diamond means positive treatment. Shepard's organizes citing references by jurisdiction and court, which makes it faster to see whether a court that binds you has treated the case negatively.
Is there a free citator?
There is no free equivalent of KeyCite or Shepard's, but there are two workable options. Many state bars include a Fastcase or vLex library in your dues, which comes with Authority Check, so confirm what your bar already gives you before buying anything. Otherwise you can read subsequent history manually on CourtListener or Google Scholar, which is genuinely slower and easier to get wrong, and is not appropriate for a filing.
What replaced Casetext SmartCite?
Nothing replaced SmartCite as a standalone, self-serve citator. Thomson Reuters retired Casetext on April 1, 2025, roughly eighteen months after acquiring it for 650 million dollars, and the citator function now reaches users through Westlaw and CoCounsel Legal under the KeyCite flag system rather than as SmartCite. Former Casetext users who need good-law checking are pushed toward a Westlaw subscription, which is a substantially larger purchase.
What is the difference between KeyCite and Shepard's?
They do the same job on different platforms and disagree more often than most researchers expect. KeyCite runs on Westlaw with a flag system; Shepard's runs on LexisNexis with signals and organizes citing references by jurisdiction and court. A 2018 Law Library Journal study by Paul Hellyer found each missed or mislabeled about a third of negative citing relationships across the 357 relationships it reviewed, so checking both catches cases either one alone would miss.
If a case is distinguished, is it still good law?
Usually yes. Distinguishing means a later court decided the case did not apply to the facts in front of it, not that the case was wrongly decided. The original holding stands and remains citable. What matters is why it was distinguished: if courts keep distinguishing a case on facts close to yours, that pattern is a practical warning about how far the holding will stretch, even though the case is technically still good law.
Find the case, then validate it
Ask your question in plain English and get the on-point precedent with a real citation to take into your citator. Published pricing from 29 dollars per month, no sales call. Informational research, not legal advice.