Citation Verification Agent for Sydney Boutique Firms: Pre-Lodgement Citation Checks for ART and Court Filings
Your firm is seven lawyers. You don’t have a precedents team, you don’t have a research librarian, and the partner who used to manually re-check every authority in every submission retired two years ago. An ART matter is due Friday, the principal is in mediation, and the senior associate has used a model to help structure the expert evidence section. Somewhere in that document is a citation that may or may not exist. The Administrative Review Tribunal’s practice directions apply the same accuracy expectations whether or not AI touched the draft. The Citation Verification Agent is built to catch hallucinated authorities before lodgement — at the pace a small firm actually files.
Why it matters now
The Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), which replaced the AAT in October 2024, publishes practice directions and guidance for practitioners appearing before it — including directions covering expert evidence and the form of materials filed. Authorities cited in submissions and expert reports are subject to the same accuracy expectations as in any superior court, and the Tribunal’s directions are the operative reference for practitioners preparing ART matters. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules (Rule 19) require solicitors to be candid with the court or tribunal and not to mislead it — and that obligation extends to citing fictitious or misattributed authorities, regardless of whether a person or a model produced them. Boutique firms feel this most acutely: there is no second-line reviewer, the filing schedule does not slow down, and a single hallucinated citation in an ART submission or supporting expert report is the firm’s risk to carry. The Citation Verification Agent is the pre-lodgement check that closes that gap.
The 5-minute view
- Citation hallucination is the production of plausible-looking but non-existent or misattributed authorities by a language model — fictitious case names, invented paragraph references, real cases assigned to the wrong tribunal, court or year
- ART practice directions and guidance govern the form and accuracy of materials filed with the Tribunal, including expert evidence and the authorities cited within it
- ASCR Rule 19 (candour) applies to anything filed under a solicitor’s name — including AI-assisted drafts
- For a firm under 10 lawyers, manual re-verification of every authority across every active matter is not realistic on current filing cadences
- The Citation Verification Agent extracts every cited authority from a draft and checks it against an Australian authority registry (Federal Court, Federal Circuit and Family Court, High Court, State Supreme Courts, AustLII)
- Each citation is returned with a status: verified, mismatched (wrong court/year/paragraph), or not found — and a recommended action
- The agent runs locally — no draft content is sent to external LLMs, which matters when the matter file is confidential
What Exegesis is building
The Citation Verification Agent is the core feature of RuleCheck by Exegesis — a local-first, deterministic, no-external-LLM pre-lodgement filing checker for Australian legal teams. RuleCheck is live in beta at rulecheck.onrender.com and accepts .txt or .md filing drafts, including ART submissions and supporting materials. The verification logic extracts citation patterns, queries the authority registry deterministically (no model inference), and returns a structured readiness report identifying every citation along with its verification status. The architecture is intentionally narrow: it does not generate new legal content, does not store filing drafts beyond the configured retention period, and does not transmit content to external services. For a boutique firm without a dedicated infosec function, that narrowness is the entire point.
The deliverable
- A pre-lodgement Citation Verification Report covering every authority reference in your draft
- Per-citation status: verified, mismatched, or not found
- Recommended action per finding (re-verify against AustLII, replace, remove)
- Markdown report suitable for archiving alongside the matter file
- Optional audit log entry for governance and PI insurance purposes
- Delivered via the RuleCheck web interface immediately after file upload; processing typically completes within seconds to a minute for documents under 10 pages
CTA
RuleCheck’s Citation Verification Agent is live in beta. We’re scoping the right pricing structure for firms under 10 lawyers — per-filing, per-user monthly, or whole-of-firm licence — based on what waitlist firms tell us they actually need. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when access opens.
Sources
- Administrative Review Tribunal — Practice Directions and Other Guidance for Professionals and Practitioners: 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
- AustLII (Australasian Legal Information Institute): https://www.austlii.edu.au/
Exegesis capability references: