Citation Verification Agent for Melbourne In-House Counsel: Verify Every Authority Before It Leaves Your Legal Team

Your legal team sits inside the business. Briefs go out under your name to external counsel, to the board, to the regulator. Someone in the team has been using an LLM to speed up first drafts — a position paper here, a contentious response there. The citations look fine. They almost always do. But you carry the candour obligation under the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules whether the words came from you, a junior, or a model. The Citation Verification Agent is built so you can confirm every authority in a document before it crosses a desk you don’t control.

The problem

In-house teams in Victoria operate under the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules 2015. Rule 19 (duty to the court) and the broader candour obligations don’t bend because the drafter used a generative tool, and they don’t sit only with the litigator who eventually files the document — they sit with the solicitor whose advice or correspondence reaches the court, the regulator, or a counterparty relying on it as authority.

The practical problem is throughput. A general counsel reviewing twenty pieces of work a week cannot manually verify each cited case in AustLII against the proposition it’s offered for. Fictitious or misattributed authorities — the standard failure mode of large language models on legal text — survive review precisely because the surrounding prose is competent. The risk shows up later, in a regulator response, an external counsel handover, or a board paper that gets quoted back at you.

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. It 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). The verification is deterministic — there is no model inference in the verification step, so the agent cannot itself hallucinate a confirmation.

Each citation is returned with a status:

• Verified — the case exists, the court is correct, the year matches
• Mismatched — the case exists but the court, year, or paragraph reference is wrong
• Not found — the citation cannot be located in the registry and should be treated as fabricated until proven otherwise

The draft never leaves your environment. RuleCheck does not transmit the document to an external LLM and does not store content beyond the configured retention period.

How it works

1. Upload a .txt or .md draft of the document — advice memo, board paper, response to regulator, brief to external counsel — through the RuleCheck interface.
2. The agent extracts every citation pattern (case names, court abbreviations, year, report series, paragraph pinpoints).
3. Each citation is queried deterministically against the Australian authority registry. No language model is invoked in this step.
4. A structured report is returned: verified citations, mismatched citations with the registry record, and citations not found.
5. Each finding carries a recommended action — re-verify against AustLII, replace, or remove — and the report is exportable as Markdown for the matter file or your in-house audit log.

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

Why this matters in Melbourne

Victorian solicitors — including those employed in-house — are governed by the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules 2015, made by the Law Council under section 427(2) of the Uniform Law and in force in Victoria since 1 July 2015. The ASCR are a statement of the profession’s ethical obligations as officers of the court, and they apply to in-house counsel admitted in Victoria the same way they apply to private practitioners. The candour duty, and the prohibition on misleading a court or counterparty by tendering authority that does not exist, does not turn on whether you are billing a client or sitting in a corporate legal function.

For in-house teams, the practical exposure is different from a litigation firm’s: your work product is often the input to someone else’s filing. If a fabricated citation reaches external counsel and is filed, the originating solicitor’s conduct is in scope. Verifying before handover is the cheapest point in the chain to catch it.

Sources

• 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/
• Federal Court of Australia — Rules, Acts & Regulations: https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/law-and-practice/rules-acts-and-regulations

Exegesis capability references:

• RuleCheck by Exegesis — live beta
• Citation Verification Agent spec

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when pricing and access tiers launch for Melbourne in-house legal teams

RuleCheck’s Citation Verification Agent is live in beta. We’re scoping the right pricing structure (per-document, per-user monthly, or in-house team licence) based on demand. 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.