Civic & Government /Retrieval (RAG) live field guide · 8 min

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.

Open the live demo

theater/demos/civic-gov_policy-precedent-finder.html · sandbox · read-only

Open

FIG. 1

The live demo, running on fabricated data. Open it to step through the full flow — every output is shown for a person to approve before anything happens.

How it would work

Reads an officer's question against the council's own delegations, local laws and decisions register, drafts a plain-language answer with the clause and precedent quoted, and hands it to that officer to confirm before they rely on it.

Input 01

A question, plus the corpus

A natural-language question from an officer — "can we waive this fee, and who signs off?" — asked against the council's indexed Instrument of Delegation, local laws, decisions register and records/FOI policy.

Agent 02

Retrieves, grounds, cites

Searches only the documents the asking officer is authorised to see, retrieves the matching passages, and drafts an answer that quotes the operative delegation item and the precedent decision number — or refuses when nothing on file grounds the question.

Output 03

A cited draft, for the officer to confirm

A draft answer with each source card shown — delegation item, decision number, verbatim quote — or an explicit "not in your documents, escalate" card. The officer reads the cited passages and confirms it applies before relying on it.

Where it works well

It finds the settled answer that already exists on the record — and cites the clause so the officer can trust it.

Best for the officer fielding "can we do this, and who signs off?" — a governance, community-services or customer-facing team lead.
At a single council with years of decisions and a handful of delegation instruments, the consistency gain is large — two officers asking the same question get the same cited answer.
The recaptured time — minutes instead of an afternoon hunting a minute book — goes back into the judgement calls, not the search.

The slow, invisible problem is institutional memory leaking out the door: the precedent that settled a fee-waiver question and the delegation clause that says who can sign it both exist in the archive, findable only by the people who remember they are there.

Where it works badly

It is confidently wrong when a decision overrode an instrument that was never updated — and the citation makes the stale clause look authoritative.

Useless for "custom and practice" that lives in an experienced officer's head and never made it into a policy.
Wrong tool for genuinely novel questions of law or policy — ones with no precedent on file. It should refuse, not improvise.
Only as current as the last re-index — a delegation revoked last month still answers if the revocation never reached the indexed copy.

The honest test

Pick five questions your team actually asks in a month: if most of them live only in someone's memory or an email thread, the retrieval layer has nothing to stand on yet, and the first job is capturing them — not installing the tool.

If a delegation limit was changed by a council resolution nobody folded back into the Instrument of Delegation, the tool retrieves and cites the superseded clause in complete good faith. It has no way to know the report overrode the instrument. That is the trap.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't

It surfaces the clause and the precedent. An officer decides whether they still apply. That boundary is deliberate.

WHAT IT DOES

Quotes the operative delegation item and the precedent decision number

Shows a grounded-confidence signal and which documents it matched

Refuses and escalates when no indexed passage grounds the question

WHAT IT WON’T

Decide whether a precedent still applies or a delegation is validly exercised

Rule on whether an FOI exemption is engaged

Answer questions that fall outside the indexed corpus

Acting outside delegation can invalidate a council decision, and a wrong call on releasing information or using surveillance footage engages duties under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Vic), the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic) and the Surveillance Devices Act 1999 (Vic). The accountable officer stays on the decision because the consequence is legal and public.

What your data has to look like

A current, authoritative corpus — version-stamped documents, stable decision numbers, and permissions that mirror your access model.

Typical readiness

across orgs we see, before the first job

One authoritative, version-stamped corpus

Needs shaping

Decisions with stable identifiers

Usual weak point

A current Instrument of Delegation

Needs shaping

Permissions mapped to your access model

Usual weak point

A named owner who re-indexes on change

Needs shaping

The real first job

Getting to one indexed, version-stamped, permission-mapped corpus is usually the larger and more valuable piece of work — it is mostly about how documents are captured and versioned, not about buying a tool. That work pays off whether or not the AI layer ever goes live; the retrieval on top is the easy part.

Right fit if…

Officers regularly ask "can we do this, and who signs off?" and the answer exists on the record

You have a clean Instrument of Delegation and a decisions register with stable numbers

Long-serving officers hold knowledge you are at risk of losing when they leave

Your access controls can map cleanly onto who may see which documents

Walk away if…

Your delegations and decisions live only in someone's memory or in email threads

Nobody owns re-indexing when an instrument or local law changes

Most of the questions you ask are genuinely novel — no precedent on file

You want a tool that decides whether a precedent applies, not one that cites it

Open questions

The worried-buyer questions, answered straight

It can — which is exactly why 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. As a Victorian council your CCTV and personal-information holdings sit under the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic); permissions here mirror your existing access controls, so an officer only ever gets answers drawn from documents they are already authorised to see.

What it takes to build

3–4 weeks · 4 phases

Reused from template~70%

Bespoke to this skin~30%

stack · Claude · private RAG · SharePoint connector

What it would cost

Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.

Bite-sized first piece

One contained change, low risk

Pilot build

Most builds land here

Embedded support

Scale on proof

Considering this for your council?

The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — one contained change, low risk. Tell us where the institutional memory is leaking; we'll play it back, scope it, and show you what's possible.

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