SRL AI Notice & Explanation Agent for Melbourne Boutique Firms: Plain-English AI Disclosures for Self-Represented Litigants
You’re a five-lawyer firm in Melbourne. Half your ART work is unbundled — a community legal centre refers a self-represented applicant, you draft the statement of facts and contentions, the applicant files it themselves. Now the Tribunal expects clear disclosure when AI tools have been used in preparation, and the person reading that disclosure isn’t another lawyer. It’s the applicant — sometimes with limited English, sometimes under stress, often without legal training. The standard footer your firm uses for represented matters doesn’t pass that test. The SRL AI Notice & Explanation Agent generates the disclosure that does.
The problem
The Administrative Review Tribunal sits across migration, NDIS, social security, veterans’ affairs and Centrelink reviews. A large share of applicants are self-represented or assisted by community legal services. When AI tools touch a document that an SRL will sign, file, or rely on, two obligations collide. The first is the Tribunal’s expectation, set out in its practice directions, that material put before it is accurate and that practitioners are candid about how it was produced. The second is the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules — particularly the duty of candour and the duty not to mislead — which apply whether you’re representing the client of record or assisting them in an unbundled capacity.
A disclosure written for a Tribunal member is not a disclosure written for an SRL. The first assumes legal training, familiarity with terms like “generative model” and “retrieval-augmented”, and an understanding of why the disclosure exists. The second has to explain — in language an applicant can act on — what was generated, what was checked, what the applicant should re-read before signing, and where they can get help. Most boutique firms don’t have the bandwidth to draft that twice for every matter.
What the SRL AI Notice & Explanation Agent does
The SRL AI Notice & Explanation Agent produces plain-English AI use notices for self-represented litigants — the version of your disclosure that goes to the applicant, not the bench. It takes the inputs you already record for your professional file (which tools were used, on which sections, what was verified against authority, what the applicant needs to check themselves) and outputs a notice written at a reading level appropriate for community legal sector use. The deliverable is designed to sit alongside — not replace — the practitioner-facing disclosure you provide to the Tribunal.
The agent is part of the Exegesis legal stack and is intended for boutique firms and community legal centres working with ART applicants, migration review applicants, and other SRL-heavy jurisdictions.
How it works
- Intake. You provide the matter type (ART division, e.g. migration, NDIS, social security), the AI tools used, the document sections they touched, and the verification steps you took (citation checks, factual checks, applicant-confirmation steps).
- Plain-English drafting. The agent generates a notice written for the applicant — what the tool did, what you checked, what they still need to read carefully before signing, and what to do if something looks wrong.
- Dual-output pairing. It also produces the practitioner-facing disclosure for the Tribunal, so the two versions stay consistent. If one changes, the other is regenerated.
- Verification pass. Citations and authority references in the underlying document are checked through RuleCheck (the open-source citation verifier at github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck) before the notice is finalised — so the disclosure reflects work that’s actually been verified.
- Archive. Both versions are saved as Markdown to the matter file with a timestamp, ready for the Tribunal bundle and for your file-closure record.
Why this matters in Melbourne
Melbourne’s community legal sector — Victoria Legal Aid referral panels, suburban CLCs, the migration assistance providers operating around Footscray, Dandenong and the CBD — runs a high volume of ART work through boutique firms on unbundled retainers. The applicants those firms assist are often the ones least equipped to interpret a generic AI disclosure footer. The Tribunal’s practice directions and the ASCR candour rules apply equally to a five-lawyer firm doing pro bono migration work and to a national firm running corporate litigation; the difference is that the boutique firm doesn’t have a knowledge-management team writing plain-English templates. The SRL AI Notice & Explanation Agent is that template, generated per matter.
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
- Law Council of Australia — Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: https://lawcouncil.au/policy-agenda/regulation-of-the-profession-and-ethics/australian-solicitors-conduct-rules
- RuleCheck (open-source citation verifier): https://github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck
Join the waitlist
The SRL AI Notice & Explanation Agent is in build. We’re scoping pricing for boutique firms and community legal centres separately — community legal sector access will be discounted or sponsored. Join the waitlist and tell us about your ART caseload; what we hear will shape who pays what.