In this paper we present initial results from our effort to automatically detect references in decisions of the courts in the Czech Republic and link these references to their content. We focus on references to case-law and legal literature. To deal with wide variety in how references are expressed we use a novel distributed approach to reference recognition. Instead of attempting to recognize the references as a whole we focus on their lower level constituents. We assembled a corpus of 350 decisions and annotated it with more than 50,000 annotations corresponding to different reference constituents. Here we present our first attempt to detect these constituents automatically.