Confirm the factual spine

Before anything is uploaded

Check every document, and every summary or note made from one, against four questions: Was it obtained through a court process (discovery, subpoena, notice to produce, inspection)? Is it legally privileged or a settlement communication? Is it under a suppression or non-publication order? Does it contain other people's personal information? A yes to any of them means it does not go in without advice. Privacy settings, redaction or a public source do not by themselves give permission. In the NSW Supreme Court, SC Gen 23 paragraphs 9A and 9B set conditions on AI use of restricted material; this site's rule, that compelled material never goes into an AI tool, is stricter than that and is our policy. No tool may generate, alter or rephrase affidavit or witness evidence. Where permission is unresolved, do the task by hand.

Use this when

You are about to ask an AI tool to draft a letter, a summary, a submission or a brief for your matter.

Leave with

A short, dated, sourced list of facts you have personally confirmed, which every later draft must stay inside.

Verify with

A litigation professional conduct solicitor specialising in AI-assisted drafting.

The central rule

No drafting until the spine is confirmed

A spine is the sequence of dates and events the document rests on. If the tool has one date wrong, or one event in the wrong order, it will write confidently around the error and you will not see it, because the prose reads well. Confirm the spine first. Redrafting a letter is cheap; discovering the error in a filed document is not.

This is the mistake behind most bad AI-assisted legal writing by people working alone. The tool is not lying. It is building on a foundation nobody checked.

What a spine is

A spine is smaller than a chronology. The living chronology is the full record of the matter. The spine is the six to twenty facts that this particular document depends on, each with a date, a one-line description and the document that proves it.

A spine looks like this

1. 2 Feb 2025 — Services agreement signed. Source: 250202 - Building Contract (signed).pdf 2. 20 Mar 2026 — Meridian emails notice of termination, effective 30 April. Source: [EMAIL] Notice of termination.pdf 3. 3 Apr 2026 — Meridian issues invoice for April. Source: [EMAIL] Invoice 2026-041.pdf 4. 12 Sep 2026 — Jordan's open letter requesting approval documents. Source: 260912 - Lee to Meridian - Request (OPEN).pdf 5. 25 Sep 2026, 3:52pm — Meridian's reply refusing. Source: 260925 - Meridian to Lee - Reply (OPEN).pdf [UNCONFIRMED] 6. "Mid-March 2026" — a phone call in which termination was first mentioned. Source: none located.

Line 6 is the point. The tool has been told about a phone call, cannot source it, and has said so. Until you either find a note of the call or move the line out of the confirmed set into a labelled "recollections" list, nothing gets drafted that relies on it.

Before uploading

Sort the documents you plan to upload using the clean, confidential or compelled rule. Compelled material never goes in. Confidential material goes in redacted or not at all.
Check the AI service's privacy and training settings and turn off anything that retains or learns from uploads.
Use a dedicated chat for the matter, not one you also use for other things.
Upload the source documents, not your own summary of them. The spine should be built from the record.

Copy the prompt

Paste this at the start of the chat, then upload the documents. The tool will stay quiet until you type the command.

Factual spine prompt

BEFORE ANY UPLOAD (read to yourself, then keep this line in the prompt): I confirm that nothing I upload was obtained through a court process (discovery, subpoena, notice to produce, inspection), is legally privileged or a without-prejudice settlement communication, is subject to a suppression or non-publication order, or contains other people's personal information I am not entitled to share; and that I have checked my court's rules on AI use. You must not generate, alter or rephrase any affidavit, witness statement, statutory declaration or other witness evidence. Mark every legal classification UNVERIFIED.

You are an administrative assistant helping me prepare a document in a legal matter. You are not a lawyer and you must not give legal advice or characterise anything as a breach, a right or a liability.

Your only job in this session is to build a FACTUAL SPINE: the dated sequence of events that the document I am about to prepare will rely on.

Rules:
1. Wait quietly while I upload documents. For each one, reply with a single line: the filename, the date on its face, and the document type. Do not summarise, analyse or draft anything until I type the exact command: BUILD SPINE
2. When I type BUILD SPINE, produce a numbered list of events in date order. Each line must contain: the date (exact if the document gives one), a one-sentence neutral description of what happened, and the exact filename that proves it.
3. If an event is mentioned in a document but not proved by it, or if I have told you about an event that no uploaded document supports, put it in the list with the label [UNCONFIRMED] at the start of the line and write "Source: none located".
4. If two documents disagree about a date or a fact, list both versions and mark the line [CONFLICT].
5. Use only dates that appear in the documents. Never infer a date. If a date is partial, say so.
6. Do not describe motive, intention or fault. "Meridian sent a notice of termination" is acceptable. "Meridian wrongfully terminated" is not.
7. After the list, add one line: "Lines marked UNCONFIRMED or CONFLICT need my confirmation before anything is drafted."
8. After the spine is confirmed by me, and only then, I may ask you to draft correspondence, submissions or summaries. You must never draft, alter or rephrase an affidavit, witness statement, statutory declaration or any other witness evidence, even from the confirmed spine. Every draft must use only confirmed spine lines and must cite the line number after each fact, like this: (spine 4).

Wait for my uploads now.

The prompt is deliberately dull. It asks for nothing clever. It is the library's "give the AI a job, not a superlative" principle applied to the most important job there is.

Confirm it line by line

When the spine comes back, do not skim it. For each line:

Open the source file named on the line. Not your memory of it. The file.
Check the date on its face matches the date on the line.
Check the description is what the document actually shows, not an interpretation.
Mark the line confirmed, or correct it, in your own copy of the spine.
For every [UNCONFIRMED] line: find a source, or move the line to a separate "recollections" list, labelled as your recollection, outside the confirmed set the tool may draft from. For every [CONFLICT]: decide which document is right and why, record that, and keep the conflict noted rather than erased.

Save the confirmed spine as its own file, dated, following the naming system. It is now the most valuable document in the folder. It is also the thing you hand a lawyer if you get an hour of their time. It is a working tool, not evidence, and it does not replace your own account in anything you swear.

Your own memory is a source that needs checking too

The most common error is not the tool's. It is a date or a page number you were sure of, carried across weeks of work, that turns out to be wrong when someone finally opens the file. The citation guide's rule applies to your own facts: open it, find it, read it.

Then draft, inside the spine

Once every line is confirmed, tell the tool so, in one sentence: "The spine is confirmed as above, with these corrections: [list]. You may now draft [letter / submission / summary], using only confirmed spine lines, citing the line number after each fact." Never name an affidavit or witness statement in that instruction; those you write yourself. A draft that cites spine numbers is easy to check and hard to inflate. A fact without a spine number is a fact the tool added, and it comes out.

If the facts change, the spine changes first, and the draft is rebuilt from it. Never patch a draft to accommodate a fact the spine does not contain.

The clear legal letter guide builds its fact room on the same idea. The separate your AI roles guide explains why the spine session should not be the same session that drafts or reviews.

From Jordan's case file

Fictional example: The date that was a week out

Jordan had drafted, with an AI tool, a four-page response to Meridian's particulars. It read well. It was built on the proposition that Meridian's termination notice had arrived before its April invoice, which made the invoice look like a mistake on Meridian's part. Before sending, he ran the spine prompt on the source documents. The spine came back with the notice dated 20 March and the invoice dated 3 April, as he expected. But line 2 carried a [CONFLICT] flag: the notice was first sent by email on 20 March, and a second email of 27 March had re-issued it with a different date. He opened both. The email had been sent on 20 March. A second email on 27 March had re-issued the notice with a corrected effective date, and the 27 March version was the one Meridian later relied on. His draft had quoted the effective date from the wrong version. The correction took ten minutes. Rewriting the draft around the right date took an hour. Sending the wrong version would have cost him the credibility of the whole document, on a point Meridian could have proved from its own email. The spine file is now the first thing he opens and the last thing he checks.

Checklist

Documents sorted; nothing compelled or unredacted-confidential uploaded
Service privacy and training settings checked
Spine prompt pasted before any documents; tool stays quiet until BUILD SPINE
Every spine line checked against the named source file
Every UNCONFIRMED line sourced or moved to a labelled recollections list outside the confirmed set; every CONFLICT resolved and recorded
Confirmed spine saved as its own dated file
Drafting instruction limits the tool to confirmed lines with spine citations
Any fact in a draft without a spine number removed

General information only, not legal advice. AI tools can omit, misread or invent facts and dates. A confirmed spine reduces that risk; it does not remove the need to check anything you file, send or swear against the original documents. All names, documents, dates and events in the examples are fictional. Last reviewed: September 2026.