Open Bankruptcy Project methodology · citation mirror at bankruptcymill.org
Documentary-Anchoring Discipline is the methodological rule that every operative factual claim in a legal work product must be sourced to an adversary-authored artifact, a court-filed document, or a similarly non-disavowable record. Inference, summarization, and AI-generated synthesis are productivity layers over the anchors; they are never autonomous sources. The work product's authority derives from the anchor, not from the assembly. Because the anchors are documents the adversary cannot disavow (the adversary's own emails, billing records, signed filings, transmittal covers), truth as a defense is structurally locked: every factual claim is the adversary's own document.
The discipline is the inversion of the hallucination archetype documented in Mata v. Avianca, 22-cv-1461 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), and Park v. Kim, No. 22-2057 (2d Cir. 2024), in which AI tools generated nonexistent cases that counsel adopted without verification. The inversion is structural: instead of AI generating claims that counsel must then verify, anchors generate claims that AI then assembles.