The Special Committee on Citation Issues was created by the Board of Governors to recommend a policy concerning citation to reports of legal decisions. The Committee submitted a draft report on citations reform on March 18, 1996. This report recommended all jurisdictions adopt a system for citation to case reports that would be equally effective for printed case reports and for case reports electronically published on computer discs or network services.

The ABA Special Committee on Citation Issues then submitted their Final Report and Recommendation dated, May 23, 1996. On August 6, 1996, the American Bar Association's House of Delegates favorably passed a motion for a universal citation system recommendation to the courts. The Resolution from Report No. 107 recommends that courts adopt a universal citation system using sequential decision numbers for each year and internal paragraph numbers within the decision. The numbers should be assigned by the court and included in the decision at the time it is made publicly available by the court. It also recommends that parallel citations to commonly used print sources be strongly encouraged. The Citation system is equally adaptable to printed and electronic case reports and is thus medium neutral.

Report No. 107 was co-sponsored by the Committee, the Section of Litigation, the Tort and Insurance Practice Section, the Section of Science and Technology, the Massachusetts Bar Association, the State Bar of South Dakota, the State Bar of Wisconsin, the Atlanta Bar Association, the Milwaukee Bar Association, and the ABA Coordinating Commission on Legal Technology.

After the passage of the resolution in 1996 the Special Committee on Citation Issues was disbanded. The ABA's Standing Committee on Technology and Information Services (SCOTIS) was named to take on the implementation of the ABA Official Citation Resolution. Since the 1996 resolution a number of groups have addressed the universal citation issue, including the American Association of Law Libraries’ (AALL) Citation Formats committee, the Association of Legal Writing Directors, and LegalXML, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to the development of extensible markup language (XML) standards for lawyers, to name a few. Fifteen state jurisdictions have addressed the issue of uniform case citation since the ABA resolution was passed. The passage of time since the ABA’s 1996 resolution yielded a splintering of opinion about the most appropriate way to create universal citation format.

At the 2003 American Bar Association Midyear Meeting SCOTIS presented a supplementary resolution to the ABA House of Delegates to allow American Bar Association members and staff to work jointly with other organizations to develop a universal standard. Summed up in the SCOTIS report, the goal of the resolution is help to yield a universal citation system, reflecting the consensus of the experts and organizations marshaled by the ABA, and benefiting the legal profession and the public as technology makes increasing amounts of information available electronically.