Have you ever spent the precious hours just before a deadline frantically proofing your brief, trying to remember if you're supposed to abbreviate governmental, steamship, partnership, or Alaska and flipping through your Bluebook tables to figure out the answer? (To save you some searching: No, yes, yes, no.) This Bluebook Cite Abbreviation Fixer has been designed to help lawyers, law students, and other legal professionals speed up the proofreading on their legal writing. Now, instead of wasting time searching out each and every word in your cite, you can just copy and paste your full citation into this simple tool and it will abbreviate all the words for you.

Paste one or more full citations into the top box.
Click "fix this cite"
The tool will find and replace any words found in Bluebook v.22 tables 6, 10.1, 12, and 13 and a few other key words with their abbreviations*
The result will display in the bottom box.
Copy and paste the corrected cites into your brief (you'll have to add the italics and other formatting manually, sorry!)

Also, there are few quirky rules that a Python script just can’t handle:

If the abbreviator puts a period in the middle of a word, that means the full word is not in the table, but that a shorter version of the word is. You should reject that abbreviation. (eg. contractor will become cont.or because contractor is not abbreviated but contract is)

Per T13, periodical titles have some unique rules that this App does not (and cannot) incorporate: “Abbreviate “University” as “U.” (“U. Chi. L. Rev.”). Also, omit the words “a,” “at,” “in,” “of,” and “the” (but retain the word “on”). Furthermore, if the title consists of only one word after the words “a,” “at,” “in,” “of,” and “the” have been omitted, do not abbreviate the remaining word.

Also, where Law is the first word in a title, do not abbreviate it; in all other cases it should be abbreviated L. And California is always abbreviated as Cal. (which this App does automatically)—except for law reviews (e.g. the California Law Review should be abbreviated Calif.). United States is not abbreviated when it is the full name of a party (B10.1.1), so you’ll want to reject that change if that’s the full name of your party.

So, in the end, you may still need to consult the Bluebook, but JohnnyTech hopes this tool helps you have to use it less to perfect your legal writing!

If you find any errors in the database or have suggestions for improvement, please contact support@bluebook.johnnytech.net

*Other abbreviations this tool will check for: 2nd to 2d and 3rd to 3d; U.S.C.; and proper spacing for abbreviations such as F.Supp., N.W.2d., and So. 2nd.

To download:

Click on the link to download, then under download options choose "zip file". This will download a zipped file to your computer. To unzip, open your downloads, then right click on the zipped folder called APP and select "extract all." To run the app itself, open the folder called "App", then open "app" (it may show as app.bat). The first time you run it you may have to download Python onto your computer (click "yes" to any prompts asking if you want to install it) and if Windows gives you a security warning click on "more information" then "run anyway". This app will work on Windows 10 (as long as you've updated it relatively recently) or Windows 11. (If you have an older version email the support email address above for help.)

JohnnyTech BlueBook Cite Abbreviation Fixer

To download:

Download the app today and boost your citation experience!