Policy · Knowledge Management
Precedent review and approval procedure (including AI-drafted and AI-updated precedents)
A procedure for the life of every firm precedent: request, drafting, technical and legal review, approval by a named practitioner, publication to people and AI tools, monitoring for law changes, urgent fixes, versioning and retirement, with extra controls for AI-drafted content.
- Kind
- Policy. A policy or procedure for a firm or client.
- Where it applies
- Australia
- AI use
- Yellow AI can help in set ways. A lawyer checks specific points before use.
- Law stated as at
- 17 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked against the cited sources on 17 October 2026.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Use to govern a firm's precedent bank, clause library and practice notes, especially once AI tools draft or update precedents or retrieve them for lawyers. It does not replace the supervising lawyer's review of a precedent as adapted for a particular matter.
How AI may be used
AI may find precedents affected by a law change, draft marked-up updates and run consistency checks. A named practitioner reviews every AI-drafted or AI-updated precedent in full and approves it before it is published to lawyers or to AI retrieval.
AI may
- Find every precedent that cites an amended or repealed provision and draft marked-up changes for the reviewer.
- Check precedents against the metadata standard and flag missing fields, expired review dates and broken links.
- Compare a draft with the existing precedent and produce a change summary for the approver.
AI must not
- Must not approve or publish a precedent, or change an approved precedent without a new review.
- Must not verify its own citations; authorities are checked against official registers by a person.
- Must not use client documents as drafting sources unless they have been cleared under the know-how capture form.
The lawyer checks
- The reviewer read the full text, not only the change summary.
- Every authority was checked against an official register on the date recorded.
- Licence status, jurisdiction tags and the AI-assisted flag are correct before publication.
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
More in Knowledge Management
- Precedent metadata and version-control standard (for people and AI retrieval)
- AI prompt library governance policy (prompt templates linked to precedents and tasks)
- Knowledge-base content licensing and copyright checklist (before AI ingestion)
- Matter close-out know-how capture form with confidentiality scrub
- AI knowledge assistant governance and source-citation policy (permission-aware search, information barriers, citations)
All precedents for Knowledge Management · Tasks and AI use in this area