The method · Luke's Relevance

The Relevance Ladder

Five rungs from a pile of fine print to a filed form. This is the replicable part of the 2013 story: what to gather, how to read it fast with an AI assistant while you stay the judge, and the checking habit that holds every answer to the source.

Runs today No special tools

Five rungs

The ladder is the 2013 read-through, written down as steps anyone can copy. Each rung has its own room on this site; this page is the whole ladder in one place, with the prompts to run it.

Gather

Get the laws relevant to you. Not the whole statute book: yours. Start from your wallet, your lease, your payslip and your letterbox, and work outward. Your relevance maps common life domains to the acts that tend to touch them, and nine registers shows where the official texts live, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

For your own side of the table, the Legal Memory Workbench is a live, browser-only tool that helps you map your life, work, projects, property and obligations into plain files an AI can read. It makes no external calls and keeps no accounts; your files stay with you. More on how it fits in neighbouring rooms.
Chomp

Read through fast, with an AI assistant as your reading partner and you as the judge. The assistant summarises, quotes sections and answers questions about the text. You decide what matters, what to reread in full, and what to believe. The prompts below are built for this rung.
Sort

Mark what you find: what serves you, what bites you, what looks broken for people like you, and what is missing entirely. The sorting bench gives you the frame; the dials are yours to set. Your sort, not anyone else's.
Plan

Turn the sort into a plan for the things you want changed, using the system's own tools. Change the law walks the reform ladder: forms, submissions, inquiries, members, bills.
Act

File the form. Send the submission. Sign the petition. Small, real, and on the record. Every other rung exists so that this one is aimed well.

Then and now

The 2013 read took a summer of evenings on PDFs: acts hunted down one at a time on the register websites, saved into a folder, and read cover to cover, with each thread to another act followed by hand. The filing cabinet holds the result.

The same gather-and-chomp, run today with an AI assistant against the same official sources, can fit in days. That is the size of the change: the reading collapses; the judging does not. Deciding what serves you, what bites you and what you want changed still takes human time, and that part stays yours.

47 days from the first small tax form to the last tenancy act: the span of the original read, done in the evenings. With an AI reading partner, the gathering and first pass over a similar stack can fit into days. The sorting and deciding take as long as they take.

Rung	Summer 2012 to 2013, by hand	Now, with an AI assistant
Gather	Each act hunted by name across register websites and saved one at a time, over weeks.	A starting list built from your own paperwork in an evening. The registers are still where the texts come from.
Chomp	Cover to cover, five-volume acts and all. Christmas Day 2012 went to the Corporations Act.	The assistant summarises and quotes sections in minutes per act. You still read the parts that matter in full.
Sort	Margin notes and memory.	Written notes against each act, kept as files you own, sorted with the frame on the sorting bench.
Plan and act	Forms, submissions, the ballot box.	The same forms, the same submissions, the same ballot box. The system's tools have not changed; you arrive better read.

An assistant reads faster than a person; it does not decide faster than a person, and it should not decide at all.

Prompts that do the work

Four prompts cover most of the chomp rung. Replace the square brackets with your own details. Where you can, paste the actual text or the official register link into the chat: an assistant grounded in the real text drifts less than one asked to work from memory. Every answer then goes through the verification habit below.

1. Map an act to your life

Here is my situation: [two or three plain sentences: where you live, how you earn, what you rent or own, anything unusual].

I am reading the [act name, year and jurisdiction], from [official register link]. Walk me through which parts of this act touch my situation, section by section. For each part you name, quote the exact section you rely on, give its number, and say in one sentence why it applies to me. If a part probably does not touch me, say so briefly and move on. If you are not sure, say you are not sure instead of guessing. This is legal information, not advice; I will verify each section you cite against the official register before I rely on it.

2. Plain-English one section

Here is the full text of one section of an Australian act, copied from the authorised version:

[paste the section, with its number and the act's name]

Explain it in plain English, at the level of a sharp Year 10 student. Then answer three things separately:
1. What does this section permit: who may do what?
2. What does this section bind: who must do what, and what follows if they do not?
3. Which words in it carry special defined meanings I should look up, either in this act's definitions or in the relevant Acts Interpretation Act?
Do not add anything the text does not say. Where the section depends on another provision, name that provision so I can read it next.

3. Trace the thread

I am reading the [act name, year and jurisdiction]. List the other laws this act leans on: the acts it amends, the acts that amend it, the regulations made under it, and the acts its own text refers to by name. For each one, give the exact provision in this act where the connection appears, so I can verify it in the authorised version. Present the result as a table with three columns: connected law, type of connection, where the connection appears. If you cannot point to the connection in the text, leave it out.

4. Build a starting relevance list from your own paperwork

I am going to paste text from my own paperwork: [name what you have: lease, payslip, employment contract, bank PDS, super PDS, insurance policy]. From that text alone, build me a starting list of the Australian laws that appear to sit behind it. For each law give: its full name and year; the jurisdiction (Commonwealth, or which state or territory); the lines of my document that point to it; and which official register would hold the current text. Mark each entry either "named in the document" or "inferred", and keep those two groups clearly apart. I will treat this as a starting map to verify, not as advice.

A PDS is a product disclosure statement: the fine print booklet behind a bank account, super fund or insurance policy. Two of them sit in the 2012 cabinet, filed beside the acts they answer to.

One evening, one document

If the whole ladder feels like a lot, here is a first session that fits in an evening and touches every rung once.

Pick one document you have actually signed or been handed: a lease, a payslip, a bank PDS.
Run prompt 4 on its text. You now have a starting list of the laws behind it.
Pick the one act on that list closest to whatever you care about most, and open it on its official register.
Run prompt 1 against that act, with your situation and the register link pasted in.
Take one section the assistant relied on, find it on the register, and read it with your own eyes.
Write down what you found and how you would sort it: serves, bites, broken, or missing. Keep the note as a file you own.

One document, one act, one verified section. The 2013 read was this loop, repeated for a summer. Yours can stop, pause or continue whenever you choose.

The verification habit

The three-way habit. The assistant reads and cites, you judge, and the authorised register settles what the law actually says.

One rule holds the whole ladder up: an AI answer about the law is a lead, not a finding, until you have checked it against the authorised version on the official register. Assistants can misremember section numbers, quote repealed wording, or invent citations outright. Australian courts have already dealt with lawyers filing AI-invented citations, and in 2025 an Australian lawyer was penalised for it. If the professionals can be caught out, the habit matters for the rest of us more, not less.

So: for each section an assistant relies on, open the register, find the section, and read it with your own eyes before you act on it. The registers are free.

Commonwealth · NSW · VIC · QLD · WA · SA · TAS · ACT · NT · AustLII

All of this is legal information and method, not legal advice. For advice about your own situation, a qualified lawyer. What "getting it right" has to mean before anyone should trust a legal machine is the limits page whole subject.

Five words the registers use

The registers assume you know their vocabulary. These five terms cover most of it; nine registers goes deeper.

Act: A law passed by a parliament and formally approved (assented). The top layer of written law, and what most of the 2012 cabinet is made of.
Regulation: Subordinate legislation: the detailed rules made under an act, by the government rather than the parliament, using power the act itself grants. Often where the fine-grained obligations actually live.
In force: Law that currently applies: passed, commenced, and not repealed. An act can exist on the register without being in force yet, or any more.
Reprint: A consolidated copy of an act with all its amendments woven into the text, current as at a stated date. What you want to read; the original as-passed version may be decades out of date.
Authorised version: The copy of an act or reprint that the register certifies as accurate. The one to verify against, and on some registers the only version marked as official.

Rooms for each rung

Each rung of the ladder has a room of its own on this site, and the 2012 cabinet stands as the worked example of the whole climb.

The filing cabinet

The worked example: the cabinet's 61 documents, as a ledger you can sort.

Your relevance

The gather rung in depth: life domains mapped to the acts that tend to touch them.

The sorting bench

The sort rung in depth: serves, bites, broken, missing, with the dials in your hands.

Change the law

The plan and act rungs in depth: the reform ladder from gripe to statute.

Where the ladder points

Everything on this page runs today, by hand, with any general AI assistant and the official registers. The legal engine is the design for running the same ladder at machine speed: nine statute books in, grounded and cited answers out, so that gather and chomp would take minutes rather than days. The design calls for the verification habit to be built in rather than bolted on: answers drawn only from retrieved sections, each claim cited to act and section, with a currency date shown. Until something like that exists and earns trust, the method above is the bridge.