Citation Verification Agent for Brisbane Estate Planning Lawyers: Catch Hallucinated Authorities Before They Reach a Will Dispute or Application

You’re drafting an application for letters of administration, or a submission in a family provision claim under the Succession Act 1981 (Qld). The argument turns on a handful of authorities — a Queensland Supreme Court decision on testamentary capacity, an interstate case on the Banks v Goodfellow test, a paragraph reference from a Court of Appeal judgment on adequate provision. A paralegal or an LLM helped tighten the draft. The hearing is tomorrow. Somewhere in that document may be a citation that looks right and isn’t — a plausible case name, a plausible year, a paragraph that doesn’t exist. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules don’t care whether you or a model produced it. The Citation Verification Agent is built to catch that class of failure before the document leaves your office.

The problem

Estate planning and succession work in Queensland increasingly involves AI-assisted drafting — for wills, enduring documents, family provision submissions, and probate applications. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules (ASCR), adopted in Queensland in June 2012, are derived from solicitors’ duties as officers of the court and the collective standards of the profession. Rule 19 (duty to the court) and Rule 4 (other fundamental ethical duties, including honesty) extend to every authority a solicitor places before a court or tribunal — regardless of whether a human, an associate, or a language model produced the first draft.

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 attributed to the wrong court or year. In a contested estate matter — where a small number of authorities can carry significant weight in a family provision or capacity argument — a single bad citation in a written submission can produce adverse cost consequences, professional standards referrals, and damage to the matter itself. Manual verification at the pace of probate registry timelines and contested-estate hearings is impractical for any document longer than a few pages.

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 filing checker for Australian legal teams. It extracts every cited authority from your draft (whether a probate application, family provision submission, or affidavit) and checks each against an Australian authority registry covering the Queensland Supreme Court, Federal Court, High Court, other state Supreme Courts and AustLII. Each citation is returned with a status — verified, mismatched (wrong court, year, or paragraph), or not found — and a recommended action. The verification logic is deterministic: it does not generate new legal content, does not call an external LLM, and does not transmit draft content to third parties.

How it works

  1. Export your draft submission, affidavit, or application as .txt or .md and upload it to RuleCheck.
  2. The agent extracts every citation pattern in the document — case names, court abbreviations, years, paragraph references.
  3. Each citation is queried deterministically against the authority registry (Queensland Supreme Court, High Court, Federal Court, state Supreme Courts, AustLII).
  4. The agent returns a structured Citation Verification Report listing every authority with status (verified / mismatched / not found) and a recommended action (re-verify against AustLII, replace, remove).
  5. You archive the report against the matter file as a record of the pre-lodgement check.

Why this matters in Brisbane

The ASCR were adopted in Queensland in June 2012 and continue to govern the professional and ethical obligations of Queensland solicitors. The Law Council periodically reviews the ASCR — the current 2026 review canvasses amendments responding to obligations arising under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 (Cth) — which means the rule set is actively maintained and the profession’s expectation of compliance with it is not loosening. For Brisbane estate practitioners, the practical exposure is concentrated in two places: contested family provision applications heard in the Queensland Supreme Court, and probate or administration disputes where the registrar or another party scrutinises every authority cited. In either setting, a hallucinated citation discovered by opposing counsel before you discover it yourself is a problem the ASCR does not let you walk back as “the AI did it”. Pre-lodgement verification is the cheapest insurance available.

Sources

Join the waitlist

RuleCheck’s Citation Verification Agent is live in beta. We’re scoping pricing tiers (per-filing, per-user monthly, firm-licence) based on demand from Brisbane estate and succession practices. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when access opens.

Join the waitlist — Citation Verification Agent for Brisbane estate planning lawyers