01 · Why this page exists
Through v0.1.0 these skills contained no legal authority at all. Not one statute, not one case, across roughly nine thousand words. Every Missouri proposition — "pure comparative fault," "five years," "inadmissible under the applicable rules of evidence" — was bare assertion. A skill that states Missouri law without a cite teaches the model to state Missouri law without a cite, which is the exact habit this site warns against everywhere else. It also cannot be maintained: when § 490.715 changed in 2017, nothing in a citation-free skill would have flagged that anything needed updating.
v0.2.0 fixes that. It also documents eleven errors made while fixing it, because the errors are the argument for the protocol.
02 · The rules
- Statutory text comes from the Revisor (revisor.mo.gov), not from an aggregator. Justia, FindLaw, and LawServer lag; several are currently serving the 2005 version of § 408.040 as though it were current.
- Every case is verified through CourtListener for existence and reporter citation before it enters a skill. Watch for ambiguous reporter pages — 23 S.W.3d 756 returns both Cole and State v. Holmes; 571 S.W.3d 625 returns both Brancati and Hurd. Never cite by reporter alone.
- Check appellate history before citing. A missing reporter cite on a Court of Appeals opinion is evidence of transfer, not a database gap. Jameson v. Still is the worked example: the Court of Appeals opinion at ED109161 has no S.W.3d cite because the Missouri Supreme Court took the case and decided it at SC99279. Citing ED109161 means citing a vacated opinion.
- Pin cite to the subsection, never the bare section. § 408.040.3(4), not § 408.040. § 430.225.3, not "the hospital lien statute." § 510.261.5, not "the punitive damages statute." The subsection is where the errors live.
- Date-stamp the authority file. § 191.227 fees, § 537.610 caps, and the ERISA § 502(c) penalty adjust annually; § 408.040's rate floats with the Federal Funds Rate. mo-authority.md carries a verification date and a quarterly review trigger.
- Mark contingent holdings as contingent. Ciox vacated the HIPAA Patient Rate expansion on notice-and-comment grounds and the court expressly declined the merits — HHS can restore it by rulemaking. § 303.390's constitutionality has no Missouri appellate merits ruling. § 510.261's effect on the DWI punitive standard is unlitigated. A skill that states any of these as settled will be wrong on a date nobody has scheduled.
- Where a proposition cannot be verified, it is marked ⛔ OPEN and does not ship. mo-authority.md currently carries roughly two dozen open items and names each one. The library's promise is that the skills refuse to invent facts. That promise binds the authority file first.
- The attorney signs. Not the model.
03 · What v0.2.0 actually changed
Four defects were substantive, not cosmetic:
- The demand builder's 30-day default forfeited prejudgment interest on every case where it was used. § 408.040.3(4) requires the demand to stay open ninety days — and § 408.040.3(3) requires it to enclose a claimant affidavit, a provider list, copies of all reasonably available medical bills, an employer list, and signed authorizations. A ninety-day letter without the authorizations fails identically. Emery v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 976 S.W.2d 439 (Mo. banc 1998): actual notice does not cure a formal defect.
- The chronology's billed-amount subtotal was wrong law. § 490.715.5 made actual cost the operative measure on August 28, 2017, and deleted the rebuttable presumption the 2005 version carried. Worse, the records skill already requested billed, adjusted, paid, and outstanding; the chronology discarded three of the four; and the demand table inherited a single column. One error, propagating across three skills.
- § 303.390 appeared nowhere. An uninsured claimant waives non-economic loss, and no intake question asked whether the client was insured at impact.
- The § 537.610.2 cap does not reach the individual employee-driver. Driving is ministerial, so official immunity does not attach. In a Bi-State or school-district MVA, naming the driver is the difference between a capped file and an uncapped one — Brancati: entity capped, driver liable for the full $625,000. No skill knew this.
04 · The errors we made getting here
Two independent verification passes were run over the same source material. Each caught errors the other missed, with almost no overlap. Eleven corrections in total. A sample, because the pattern is the point:
- Cited § 408.040's demand requirements at subsection .2. They are at .3 — the 2014 act renumbered.
- Asserted a 2019 amendment to § 408.040. There is no 2019 amendment. Pattern-matched to the general run of Missouri tort reform.
- Priced the forfeiture at Federal Funds + 5%. That is the postjudgment rate; § 408.040.4 sets +3% for a prejudgment-interest judgment, and the accrual rate is unsettled.
- Put § 510.261's motion deadline at 120 days before trial. It is 120 days before the final pretrial conference.
- Placed the hospital-lien 50% rule at § 430.250. It is § 430.225.3, and § 430.250 uses a different denominator — we called the mechanics "frequently misstated" and then misstated them.
- Framed the lien question as Missouri's made-whole doctrine. Wrong question: Missouri is an anti-subrogation state.
- Inverted § 303.390.2's safe harbor. The six months runs on the insurer's notice, not on the lapse, and the direction reverses. A screener built on the wrong reading clears cases it should flag.
- Marked eleven items as needing Westlaw. They did not. They needed forty minutes of tool calls. That one is worse than the factual errors: a wrong fact gets caught by verification, but a false claim that verification is impossible is the one error that stops verification from happening.
None of these were detectable by reading the document. Every one surfaced only by pulling the text, or because someone pushed back. That is the case for the protocol, and it is why the open-items list in mo-authority.md is published rather than quietly worked down.
05 · What is still open
mo-authority.md names every unverified item, currently including: § 191.227's fee schedule, § 508.010 venue, § 537.095, § 490.680, the rules of the road at §§ 304.012/.017/.351, Missouri's negligence per se elements, the current sovereign-immunity cap figure, the Ciox reporter citation, and the S.W.3d cite for Jameson. The skills do not assert any of them.
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and none of these skills practice law. Treat every AI output as a lead, never a source. The signature on the demand is yours, not the model's.