AI-Use Disclosure Clause Assembler for Melbourne Boutique Firms: Get the Disclosure Wording Right, Every Filing

You run a six-lawyer Melbourne firm. Your team uses AI to draft submissions, summarise discovery, and tidy correspondence — sensibly, with verification. The remaining problem is the disclosure paragraph itself: what exactly do you put in the filing to satisfy the Federal Court’s GPN-AI, and what changes when the same matter is before the Administrative Review Tribunal? Boutique firms don’t have a Knowledge Management partner to maintain a clause bank. The AI-Use Disclosure Clause Assembler does that job — assembles the disclosure paragraph that matches the forum, the document type, and how AI was actually used.

The problem

The Federal Court of Australia’s General Practice Note on Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GPN-AI) sets expectations for disclosing AI use in proceedings. The Administrative Review Tribunal publishes its own practice directions covering expert evidence and the conduct of proceedings, which apply distinct requirements to material prepared for the Tribunal. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules require candour to the court, and that obligation reaches the disclosure language a solicitor signs off on.

For a boutique firm, the practical problem is volume × variance. Three forums, four document types, two or three ways AI might have been used on any given matter — that’s a matrix of disclosure paragraphs that nobody on a small team has time to keep current as practice notes are updated. The failure mode is either: (a) over-disclose with boilerplate that says nothing useful, or (b) under-disclose because the partner couldn’t find the right wording at 9:40am before a 10:00am lodgement.

What the AI-Use Disclosure Clause Assembler does

The Disclosure Clause Assembler is a narrow agent that produces a compliant AI-use disclosure clause for a specific filing. You tell it:

• the forum (Federal Court, ART, state Supreme Court, other)
• the document type (originating application, written submissions, expert report, affidavit, correspondence)
• how AI was used (drafting assistance, summarisation, citation lookup, translation, none on substantive content)
• whether the output was human-verified, and by whom

It returns a disclosure paragraph drafted against the current GPN-AI and ART practice direction language, suitable for inclusion in the filing or in a covering letter. The clause is deterministic — same inputs produce the same wording — so your firm builds a consistent disclosure posture across matters without each fee-earner reinventing it.

How it works

1. Select the forum and document type. The agent loads the applicable practice note or direction (GPN-AI for Federal Court matters; the ART’s expert evidence and conduct directions for Tribunal matters).
2. Describe the AI use. A short structured form: which tasks, which tools (category, not vendor), what was verified, by whom.
3. Assembler runs locally. Clauses are composed from a maintained template library keyed to current practice-note language. No filing content is sent to an external model.
4. Output the clause. Returned as plain text plus a markdown audit note recording the inputs you supplied — so the disclosure decision is auditable inside the matter file.
5. Partner sign-off. The clause is a draft for the responsible solicitor to approve. The agent does not replace the candour obligation under ASCR Rule 19 — it makes it cheaper to discharge consistently.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Boutique Melbourne firms run federal, state and Tribunal matters in parallel — often the same client, different forum. The disclosure language that satisfies GPN-AI in a Federal Court written submission is not the same language an ART member will expect to see attached to an expert report under the Tribunal’s expert evidence practice direction. A small firm cannot afford a separate compliance workstream to track when each is updated. The Assembler is the workstream — it holds the mapping from forum and document type to current disclosure wording, and gives the partner one place to generate the clause and one place to log why it was worded that way.

For Melbourne practitioners specifically, the same matter file may need to satisfy a Federal Court registry, the ART, and Victorian Supreme Court rules within the same week. Having a single clause-assembly tool, rather than three different boilerplates copied from three different precedent folders, reduces the chance that the wrong forum’s disclosure ends up in the wrong filing.

Sources

• Administrative Review Tribunal — Practice Directions and Other Guidance: https://www.art.gov.au/help-and-resources/professionals-and-practitioners/practice-directions-and-other-guidance
• 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
• Law Council of Australia — Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: https://lawcouncil.au/policy-agenda/regulation-of-the-profession-and-ethics/australian-solicitors-conduct-rules
• Federal Court of Australia — Rules, Acts & Regulations: https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/law-and-practice/rules-acts-and-regulations

Join the waitlist

The AI-Use Disclosure Clause Assembler is in build. We’re scoping the right access model for boutique Melbourne firms — per-seat, per-matter, or annual firm licence — and the clause-template coverage we ship with at v1.

Join the waitlist for the Disclosure Clause Assembler — we’ll let you know when access opens and what shipping looks like for firms under 10 lawyers.