Policy Precedent Finder
Ask "what is our position on this, and who can sign it off?" and get a plain-language answer cited to the exact delegation clause and prior decision — so the knowledge that walks out when a long-serving officer leaves stays on the record.
A permissioned retrieval layer over your delegations, local laws, and decisions register that answers in seconds and cites every clause — and refuses when the record is silent.
Where this works well
The slow, invisible problem this addresses is institutional memory leaking out the door. The precedent that settled a fee-waiver question and the Instrument of Delegation clause that says who can sign it both exist in the archive — but they are findable only by the people who remember they are there. When those officers rotate or retire, the council quietly re-litigates settled questions and risks deciding inconsistently with its own past. This pattern earns its keep where the answers genuinely exist on the record but are buried: a current Instrument of Delegation under the Local Government Act 2020, a decisions or resolutions register, local laws, and the records/FOI policy.
It helps most the officer fielding "can we actually do this, and who signs off?" — a community-services or governance officer, a customer-facing team lead, a planner checking a delegated threshold. At a single council with years of decisions and a handful of delegation instruments, the time saved per query is small but the consistency gain is large: two officers asking the same question get the same cited answer.
Where it works badly
It fails where the answer was never written down, or was written down somewhere the index can't see. If a delegation limit was changed by a council resolution that nobody folded back into the Instrument of Delegation, the tool will retrieve and cite the superseded clause in complete good faith — it has no way to know the report overrode the instrument. The same is true for "custom and practice" that lives in an experienced officer's head and never made it into a policy.
It is also the wrong tool for genuinely novel questions of law or policy — ones with no precedent on file. The honest test: pick five questions your team actually asks in a month and check whether the authoritative answer to each already exists in a document you could hand to a new starter. If most of them live only in someone's memory or in email threads, the retrieval layer has nothing to stand on yet, and the first job is capturing them — not installing the tool.
What it doesn't do — and shouldn't
It does not decide whether a precedent still applies, whether a delegation is validly exercised, or whether an FOI exemption is engaged. It surfaces the clause and the prior decision; an officer reads them in context and makes the call. The human-in-the-loop boundary here is deliberate, because the consequences are legal and public: acting outside delegation can invalidate a decision, and a wrong call on releasing information or using surveillance footage engages real statutory duties.
That boundary is built into the behaviour. When a question falls outside the indexed corpus — the demo uses "can we use the Camp Road CCTV footage to identify illegal dumping?", which engages the Surveillance Devices Act 1999 (Vic) and Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic) obligations — the tool does not reason its way to a guess. It states plainly that nothing on file covers it and escalates to the governance and privacy officer. A confident answer to a question it can't ground is the failure mode it is explicitly designed to refuse.
What your data has to look like for this to work
The corpus needs to be the current, authoritative set — not a folder of drafts and superseded versions sitting alongside the live ones. Each document needs a version and an effective date so the tool can cite "Instrument of Delegation 2026, Item 4.12" rather than an undated copy. Decisions need stable identifiers (a decision or resolution number like CM2024-187) so a precedent can be pointed to precisely. And permissions need to map cleanly onto your existing access model, so retrieval never returns a passage an officer wasn't entitled to see.
Most councils have some of this in good shape and some of it scattered: a clean delegations register but a decisions history split across an old minutes system and PDFs, or current local laws but no single owner who re-indexes when one changes. Getting to one indexed, version-stamped, permission-mapped corpus is usually the larger and more valuable piece of work — and it is mostly about how documents are captured and versioned, not about buying a tool. That is the part we help with, and it pays off whether or not the AI layer ever goes live.
Could it give an officer a confidently wrong answer and have them act on something they shouldn't?
The safeguard is that every answer is grounded in retrieved passages and quotes them back — the delegation item and the decision number are on screen, so the officer checks the source, not just the summary. When nothing in the indexed corpus covers the question, it does not improvise: it returns an explicit "not in your approved documents" card and routes the matter to a person, as it does in the demo with the CCTV/surveillance query. It surfaces and cites; the officer decides whether to rely on it.
Our delegations and decisions are scattered across PDFs, an old minutes system, and SharePoint — will it still work?
It can index across those sources, but the answer is only ever as good as what is captured. If a delegation was amended in a council report that was never folded back into the Instrument of Delegation, the tool will cite the superseded clause in good faith. Getting the current versions into one indexed, version-stamped corpus is usually the real first job, and it is the part we help with.
Does this replace our governance officer or the person who actually knows the precedents?
No. It replaces the act of remembering which filing cabinet or minute book the answer is in — not the judgement about whether a precedent still applies. Your governance and FOI officers stay on every decision that carries legal or delegation consequence; the tool just gets them to the relevant clause in seconds instead of an afternoon, so their time goes to the judgement calls.
How current does the document set have to be — could it cite a delegation we revoked last month?
Yes, if the revocation never reached the indexed copy. The corpus is only as current as your last re-index, so each document needs a version and an effective date, and there has to be a defined owner who re-indexes when an Instrument of Delegation, local law, or fees schedule changes. Without that discipline the tool will confidently quote a stale clause.
Where does our data go — are our internal decisions and policies sent off to train someone's model?
The corpus stays in your tenancy; retrieval runs against your own indexed documents and only the matching passages plus the question are sent to the model to compose the answer. Content is not used to train the model. Permissions mirror your existing access controls, so an officer only ever gets answers drawn from documents they are already authorised to see.
Estimated build: 3–4 weeks. Most of it is template work we've already done.
Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.
The cost band reflects the engagement shape, not a per-feature line item. We work on fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates — see the services catalogue for what falls inside each band.
Considering this for your org?
The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — one contained change, low risk. Tell us where it hurts; we’ll play it back, scope it, and show you what’s possible.