How August Handles Sources and Citations
August is designed for source-grounded legal work. Use citations to confirm where an answer, extraction, or draft is coming from before you rely on it.
This video demonstrates how citations work in Assistant.
Where citations appear
Citations appear in two main contexts:
Assistant: inline citations within the response
Tabular Review: cell-level citations for extracted answers
In both cases, the goal is the same: make it easier to trace a result back to the underlying material.
How to validate a result
Read the first-pass output in full.
Open the citation for any material point, risk issue, or conclusion.
Compare August's language with the actual source text.
Refine the answer or prompt if the scope, framing, or support needs improvement.
When to be especially careful
Always validate before you share client-facing or partner-facing work. This matters most when you are:
summarizing negotiated language
comparing multiple agreements
drafting from precedent
answering research questions that depend on authority or jurisdiction
Citations support faster review, but they do not replace legal judgment. Check the cited material before you rely on an output.
Jurisdiction-aware research
If your organization is configured for a jurisdiction, August grounds legal answers in that jurisdiction's law by default. If your firm has legal research enabled, you choose which official sources August searches under Research → Legal Research in the composer, and its citations link to those sources. For an example, see Indian Legal Research with August.
You can set defaults for new chats in Settings → Profile: under Legal Research, choose your default jurisdictions and whether Web Research is on. These defaults apply to new chats only, so you can still change the research selection for any chat under Research → Legal Research in the composer. When no jurisdiction is selected, Web Research is on.