AI-Use Disclosure Clause Assembler for Brisbane Boutique Firms: Get the Disclosure Wording Right Before You File
You run a six-lawyer practice in Brisbane. Two of your matters this month involve material drafted with AI assistance — a Federal Court submission and an Administrative Review Tribunal expert report. Both regimes now expect an explicit disclosure of AI use, but the wording, the placement, and the scope of what counts as “use” differ between them. You don’t have a precedent bank for this yet, and the templates floating around LinkedIn are not something you’d stake a costs order on. The AI-Use Disclosure Clause Assembler is built to give you compliant, situation-specific disclosure language before you lodge.
The problem
Boutique firms are carrying the same disclosure-compliance burden as the majors without the precedent infrastructure to match. The Federal Court’s General Practice Note on the use of generative AI (GPN-AI) sets expectations for practitioners’ use and disclosure of AI-generated content in proceedings. The Administrative Review Tribunal publishes practice directions and guidance that govern expert evidence and conduct before the Tribunal, and these now intersect with AI-assisted preparation of reports and submissions.
The risk is not theoretical. A disclosure that is missing, vague, or pitched at the wrong level — too broad and you’ve conceded more than you needed to; too narrow and you’ve understated AI involvement to the bench — creates exposure under the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules duty of candour. For a boutique firm, a single referral to a professional standards body is an existential event, not a line item.
What the AI-Use Disclosure Clause Assembler does
The Disclosure Clause Assembler generates compliant AI-use disclosure clauses tailored to the forum (Federal Court under GPN-AI, or ART under its expert evidence and practice directions), the document type (pleading, submission, expert report, witness statement), and the actual nature of AI involvement (drafting assistance, summarisation, citation lookup, translation). It produces the clause text, a placement note (cover page, schedule, or signature block depending on forum), and an audit trail entry suitable for the matter file.
It does not invent obligations. The clause text is assembled from the disclosure expectations published by the Federal Court in GPN-AI and the ART in its practice directions — and is updated when those documents change.
How it works
- You enter the forum (Federal Court / ART / other), the document type, and a short description of how AI was used in preparing the document.
- The agent maps your inputs to the applicable disclosure expectation under GPN-AI or the relevant ART practice direction.
- It assembles a draft disclosure clause with the correct scope, plus a placement instruction (where it goes in the document).
- It produces an audit log entry — what was disclosed, on what basis, against which framework version — for the matter file.
- You review, edit if needed, and paste the clause into the filing. Verification of the underlying citations runs through RuleCheck separately.
Why this matters in Brisbane
Brisbane boutiques file across Federal Court (Queensland Registry) and the ART regularly — migration, NDIS, veterans’ affairs, tax, and Commonwealth employment matters land in the Tribunal weekly, and commercial and IP work flows into the Federal Court. Both forums now have published positions on AI use. Smaller firms tend to be earlier adopters of generative tools because the productivity gain is more visible against a smaller fee earner base, which means the disclosure obligation hits boutiques first and hardest. Getting the wording right once, with a defensible audit trail, is cheaper than getting it wrong once.
The Assembler is part of RuleCheck by Exegesis, the local-first pre-lodgement checker for Australian legal teams. The architecture is deliberately narrow: clause assembly is deterministic against the published framework text, draft content is not transmitted to external LLMs, and every generated clause carries a framework-version stamp so you can show, months later, which version of GPN-AI or the ART direction the disclosure was written against.
Sources
- Federal Court of Australia — Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Practice Note (GPN-AI): https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/law-and-practice/practice-documents/practice-notes/gpn-ai
- Administrative Review Tribunal — Practice Directions and Other Guidance: https://www.art.gov.au/help-and-resources/professionals-and-practitioners/practice-directions-and-other-guidance
- Law Council of Australia — Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: https://lawcouncil.au/policy-agenda/regulation-of-the-profession-and-ethics/australian-solicitors-conduct-rules
- RuleCheck by Exegesis (open source): https://github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck
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