Citation Verification Agent for Brisbane In-House Counsel: Verify AI-Assisted Drafts Before They Leave Your Legal Team
Your in-house team is small. The board paper is due Thursday, the response to the regulator is due Friday, and someone on the team — maybe you — used an LLM to draft the authority discussion in a memo that’s now in front of the CEO. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules apply to you just as they apply to private practice in Queensland, where the ASCR were adopted in June 2012. If a fictitious authority makes it into external correspondence or a court document filed on the company’s behalf, the candour obligation is yours. The Citation Verification Agent is built so that no draft leaves your legal function with an unverified citation in it.
The problem
Most in-house legal teams in Brisbane don’t have a litigation support function, a precedent librarian, or a dedicated drafting reviewer. You have a handful of solicitors covering commercial, regulatory, employment, and disputes — often supported by external counsel for contentious work. When generative AI gets used to accelerate first drafts (board papers, regulator responses, internal advices, instructing letters), the verification burden falls on whoever signs the document. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules, adopted in Queensland as the Australian Solicitors Conduct Rules, set out professional obligations derived from a solicitor’s duties as an officer of the court, the common law, and legislation — and those obligations don’t pause at the in-house door. A fictitious case name in a letter to ASIC, or a misattributed authority in a memo that ends up in a board pack circulated externally, is the same candour and competence problem it would be in a court submission. Manual cross-checking against AustLII for every cited authority isn’t realistic at the pace internal stakeholders expect.
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 takes a draft document (.txt or .md), extracts every cited authority, and queries an Australian authority registry (High Court, Federal Court, Federal Circuit and Family Court, State Supreme Courts, AustLII) deterministically — no model inference, no generative step. Each citation comes back with a status (verified, mismatched, or not found) and a recommended action. The agent does not generate legal content, does not transmit draft text to external services, and does not retain content beyond the configured retention period. For an in-house function operating under confidentiality obligations and internal IT policies, that narrowness is the point.
How it works
- Export the draft memo, letter, or filing as
.txtor.mdfrom your document system. - Upload to RuleCheck (currently in beta at rulecheck.onrender.com).
- The agent extracts every citation pattern from the document — case names, court abbreviations, year, paragraph references.
- Each authority is checked deterministically against the registry; the agent returns a structured report identifying verified, mismatched, and not-found citations with a recommended action per finding.
- You archive the markdown report alongside the matter file as evidence that verification was performed before the document was released.
Why this matters in Brisbane
Queensland solicitors — including those in in-house roles admitted in Queensland — are bound by the Australian Solicitors Conduct Rules as adopted in June 2012. The ASCR are described by the Law Council as “a statement of professional and ethical obligations derived from solicitors’ duties as an officer of the court, the common law and equity, legislation, and the collective judgment of the legal profession”. For in-house counsel, the practical exposure is broader than court filings: regulator correspondence, board advices, instructing letters to external counsel, and internal investigation reports all carry citations that may now be drafted with AI assistance. The Law Council’s 2026 review of the ASCR — currently consulting on amendments related to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing regime taking effect from 1 July 2026 — is a reminder that the conduct framework is actively maintained and that the profession’s expectations of competence and candour are tightening, not loosening. A pre-release verification step is the cheapest insurance against a fictitious authority reaching a stakeholder.
Sources
- Law Council of Australia — Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: https://lawcouncil.au/policy-agenda/regulation-of-the-profession-and-ethics/australian-solicitors-conduct-rules
Exegesis capability references:
Join the waitlist
RuleCheck’s Citation Verification Agent is live in beta. We’re scoping the right pricing structure (per-document, per-user monthly, or team licence) based on demand from in-house functions. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when access opens — and what we hear from you will shape how the pricing tier you sit in actually works.