Citation Verification Agent for Perth Boutique Firms: Catch Hallucinated Citations Before They Reach the Tribunal

You run a six-lawyer firm in West Perth. You don’t have a precedent library team, you don’t have a knowledge manager, and the junior who drafted the migration review submission used an LLM to compress the chronology and tidy the authorities. The hearing is Tuesday. Somewhere in the bundle is a citation that looks plausible — right court, right-sounding year, paragraph number that pattern-matches a real decision — but doesn’t exist. In a boutique, the person who signs the document is the person who drafted it, supervised it and answers for it. The Citation Verification Agent is built so a small team can verify every authority in a draft before it leaves the office.

The problem

Boutique firms feel the citation-hallucination risk more sharply than large firms for three reasons. First, fewer hands touch each document, so the second-pair-of-eyes check that catches a fabricated authority in a big-firm workflow often isn’t there. Second, smaller firms increasingly use generative AI to absorb the work a senior associate or paralegal would do at a larger shop — that’s a sensible economic response, but it shifts the verification burden onto the principal. Third, the consequences scale poorly: a single fictitious authority cited to a tribunal or court attaches to the practitioner who signed, regardless of who in the firm produced the draft.

The Administrative Review Tribunal’s expert evidence guidance, like equivalent court directions, expects practitioners and experts to vouch for the accuracy of materials placed before the Tribunal. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules (Rule 19) require candour to courts and tribunals — and a fabricated authority is a misleading statement whether or not the practitioner knew it was fabricated.

What the Citation Verification Agent does

The Citation Verification Agent is the core feature of RuleCheck by Exegesis — a local-first, deterministic, no-external-LLM pre-lodgement checker for Australian legal teams. You upload a .txt or .md draft. The agent extracts every cited authority — case names, court abbreviations, paragraph references — and checks each one against an Australian authority registry (Federal Court, Federal Circuit and Family Court, High Court, State Supreme Courts, AustLII). Each citation comes back with a status (verified, mismatched, or not found) and a recommended action. No draft content is sent to an external LLM. The verification is deterministic — same draft in, same report out — which matters for audit trails.

How it works

1. Upload the draft. A .txt or .md version of the submission, expert report, or written outline goes into the RuleCheck web interface.
2. Extraction. The agent parses citation patterns — party names, neutral citations, report series, paragraph references — without invoking a language model on the content of the document.
3. Registry lookup. Each extracted citation is checked against the authority registry. Mismatches between the cited court, year, or paragraph reference and the registry record are flagged.
4. Structured report. You get a per-citation status (verified, mismatched, not found) with a recommended action — re-verify against AustLII, replace, or remove.
5. Archive. The report is markdown, suitable for saving alongside the matter file for governance and supervision purposes.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth boutiques run a mix of work that touches federal tribunals frequently — migration review, NDIS appeals, social security, veterans’ entitlements — alongside Supreme Court of Western Australia litigation. The ART’s expert evidence practice direction and the Tribunal’s broader practice guidance place the burden of accuracy on the practitioner and the expert, not on the Tribunal to catch errors. For a small firm without a dedicated knowledge function, a deterministic pre-lodgement check fills a real gap: it replaces the supervision step that a larger firm would have built into its workflow as a matter of course. The agent runs on the draft the principal is about to sign — which is the moment that matters.

Sources

• Administrative Review Tribunal — Practice Directions and Other Guidance: https://www.art.gov.au/help-and-resources/professionals-and-practitioners/practice-directions-and-other-guidance
• Law Council of Australia — Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: https://lawcouncil.au/policy-agenda/regulation-of-the-profession-and-ethics/australian-solicitors-conduct-rules
• Federal Court of Australia — Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Practice Note (GPN-AI): https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/law-and-practice/practice-documents/practice-notes/gpn-ai
• AustLII (Australasian Legal Information Institute): https://www.austlii.edu.au/
• RuleCheck by Exegesis — live beta

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when pricing and access tiers launch for Perth boutique firms

RuleCheck’s Citation Verification Agent is live in beta. We’re scoping pricing for boutique teams — per-filing, per-user monthly, or whole-of-firm licence. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when access opens; what we hear from Perth boutiques will shape the tier structure.