Could your firm pass this AI verification test?

Every legal AI tool should be able to trace its answer directly back to a primary source. Traceability is the minimum. The quality of the source it traces to is what makes the answer defensible. If your firm is performing AI-assisted research, pull your last three AI-assisted submissions and check if they pass this test. If you're not leveraging legal AI yet, apply this standard in your trial, before you find the capability is missing.

What courts already require

Australian courts are already enforcing this standard. The Federal Court's GPN-AI practice note requires lawyers to verify AI-assisted work against primary sources and disclose where they used AI. The Supreme Courts of NSW (SC Gen 23, backed by amendments to the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules) and Victoria (SC Gen 25) impose their own versions of the same requirement. Disclosure alone doesn't satisfy these requirements. What each requires is for the sources behind an AI-assisted answer to exist, support the proposition they're cited for, and remain good law. This is the kind of scrutiny a judge, the other side, and your client are entitled to apply.

What does it look like in practice? The tool returns the case citation and the specific passage it relied on, not just a conclusion that the law "is settled". If a junior associate can't find that exact passage quickly at the primary source, the check has failed, no matter how confident the answer sounded.

What it costs when the verification check fails

Courts have tested the standard against real filings. A Federal Court judge ordered indemnity costs in Murray v Victoria [2025] FCA 731 after AI-generated citations turned out to be fabricated. A solicitor personally bore a $10,000 costs order in Mertz v Mertz (No.3) [2025] FedCFamC1A 222, for the same underlying failure. Neither case turned on whether AI was used. Both turned on whether the work could be checked.

Thomson Reuters' Future of Professionals Report 2026 found that 34 per cent of professionals now use AI their organisation hasn't formally approved. This 'shadow AI' is where the verification test fails first: nobody has checked what sources the tool draws on, or whether a lawyer can trace an answer back to them.

Legal AI vendors talk about keeping a "human in the loop." That promise means little on its own – it doesn't mean a tool enables the lawyer to trace each claim and case back to its source in a reasonable amount of time. A citation may show where an answer came from; it doesn't show whether that source deserves to be relied on. Passing the test takes fast, clear verification against primary sources. Whether the answer is worth relying on depends on what that source is.

The Federal Court has made a similar point from the bench. In a 2026 case management ruling on how AI might help manage a document-heavy class action, Justice Lee observed: "The point is not to allow a machine to determine what happened. It is to use technology to undertake the immense work of organising and synthesising primary information so that the human beings charged with exercising professional and judicial judgment can identify what really matters." (R&B Investments Pty Ltd (Trustee) v Blue Sky Alternative Investments Ltd (in liq) (Security for Costs and AI) [2026] FCA 1265, Lee J at [18]).

An AI tool that helps a lawyer get through more work, faster, is only useful if that work is accurate and can survive being checked.

What's actually behind the answer

Thomson Reuters has built a tool that makes it fast and accurate for lawyers to perform this test and meet the standard: CoCounsel Legal. The test itself, however, applies regardless of which AI provider a firm uses.

CoCounsel Legal grounds every answer in authoritative legal intelligence: Westlaw authority, Practical Law's maintained guidance, and a firm's own trusted documents. We call it Fiduciary-Grade AI™, and it's the standard for legal professionals. Grounding every answer this way means the check runs against a curated body of Australian case law, legislation, and guidance maintained by lawyers in market, so a citation leads to authority that is still good law. Every step stays visible – the sources it used, the reasoning it followed, the conclusion it reached. A lawyer can review any part of that process, because none of it is hidden. The same standard applies to routine work like confirming every citation in a submission is still binding authority before it's filed. NSW's Uniform Civil Procedure Rules require a statement that citations exist and are accurate and relevant where AI generated the content of submissions. AI only helps there if it shows its working and links to up-to-date primary sources rather than simply returning an answer.

The safest approach for any firm is to run this check internally, before a court, a client, or opposing counsel does it for them, and to ask what source each answer is checked against.

See how CoCounsel Legal handles verification, and the Australian authority it checks against. Explore CoCounsel Legal →