Smoke-alarm control
A control that detects a failure after the work is done, as post-hoc citation verification does: valuable in its place, but no substitute for an architecture that prevents the failure.
First used in The Verification Layer Is a Smoke Alarm, Not a Building Code
The metaphor concedes the value of verification before limiting it. Every building should have a smoke alarm, and a firm-wide checker that catches a fabricated citation before it reaches a judge is a legitimate control. But no building was ever built by an alarm.
A citation verifier grades only what is on the page. It cannot catch the controlling case that was never retrieved, the wrong standard applied to real cases, the uncited assertion, or the wrong procedural instrument. It also scales badly: at a 2 percent miss rate across 35 citations, fewer than half of briefs pass clean. As an inline gate it rewards citing less.
Worst, a partial control experienced as a total one erodes the human scrutiny that used to cover the gaps. The architectural alternative is never to let a model originate a citation at all.