Citation Verification Agent for Melbourne Estate Planning Lawyers: Verify Every Authority Before a Contested Probate Filing

The family provision claim is listed next week. The draft submissions cite a string of Part IV authorities, a 2019 Supreme Court of Victoria trust decision, and a High Court line on testamentary capacity. Your paralegal cleaned the prose with an LLM. The names look right, the years look right, the paragraph pin-cites look right. You know that “looks right” is not a defence under Rule 19 of the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules. The Citation Verification Agent is built so you don’t have to find that out the hard way.

The problem

Estate practice runs on authority. A contested probate caveat, a family provision claim under Part IV of the Administration and Probate Act 1958 (Vic), a trustee removal application, an equitable estoppel argument over a promised farm — each turns on a careful chain of cases and section references. When any part of a draft passes through a generative AI tool, the risk is the same: plausible-looking but non-existent or misattributed authorities. Fictitious case names, real cases assigned to the wrong court or year, paragraph pin-cites that point to nothing.

The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules apply to estate practitioners in Victoria as the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules 2015. Rule 19 (duty to the court and the administration of justice) requires solicitors to be candid with the court and not mislead it. That obligation extends to the accuracy of every authority you put before the bench — irrespective of whether you, your associate, or a tool drafted the words. Estate matters are particularly exposed: the documents are often long, the authority chains are dense, the filing windows are short, and the parties are usually distressed family members who cannot absorb an adverse costs order or a relisting.

Manual citation checking at the pace of a contested probate list is not viable. You need a deterministic, repeatable check that runs before lodgement.

What the Citation Verification Agent does

The Citation Verification Agent extracts every cited authority from a draft and checks each one against an Australian authority registry — High Court, Federal Court, Supreme Court of Victoria, Court of Appeal, AustLII. Each citation is returned with a status (verified, mismatched, or not found) and a recommended action. The agent is the core feature of RuleCheck by Exegesis, an open-source pre-lodgement filing checker for Australian legal teams (github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck). It runs locally and deterministically: no draft content is sent to an external LLM, no model inference is used to assess a citation, and no draft is retained beyond the configured retention window.

For an estate practice the deliverable is narrow and concrete:

How it works

  1. You upload the draft (.txt or .md) to RuleCheck — typically a submission, affidavit, or written outline of argument for a contested probate or family provision matter.
  2. The agent extracts every citation pattern in the document — case names, years, court identifiers, pin-cites, and statutory references.
  3. Each citation is checked deterministically against the authority registry. No language model is asked to judge whether a case “sounds real”.
  4. The agent returns a structured readiness report listing every citation with its verification status and a recommended action.
  5. You archive the report against the matter file and lodge with confidence that no fictitious authority is going to the Supreme Court of Victoria.

Processing typically completes within seconds to a minute for documents under 10 pages.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Victorian solicitors are bound by the ASCR in the form adopted under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, which commenced in Victoria on 1 July 2015. Rule 19’s candour obligation is not new, but the way drafts are now produced is. Estate practice in Melbourne — contested Part IV claims listed in the Supreme Court of Victoria, trustee disputes, capacity challenges — relies heavily on a small core of binding authority, and the cost of a misattributed citation in front of a Costs Judge or an Associate Judge is professional, not just procedural. The Law Council’s periodic ASCR reviews continue to reinforce that the rules apply to the conduct of practice as it is actually carried out today, including drafting workflows that involve AI assistance. The Citation Verification Agent is the deterministic check that keeps that workflow inside Rule 19.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when pricing and access tiers launch for Melbourne estate planning practices

RuleCheck’s Citation Verification Agent is in active development as an open-source project. We’re scoping the right packaging for estate practices — per-filing, per-user monthly, or firm-licence. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when access opens, and what we hear from you will shape how the tier you sit in actually works.