SRL Filing Accountability Assistant for Melbourne Boutique Firms: Stay on the Right Side of AI Disclosure

It’s Tuesday. You’re a partner at a six-lawyer firm in Melbourne, running an ART matter for a client who started self-represented and engaged you halfway through. Earlier filings — drafted by them, possibly with an LLM — are already on the file. Your junior has just used an AI tool to summarise the respondent’s evidence and is asking what disclosure obligations attach. The Administrative Review Tribunal’s practice directions set expectations around AI use in proceedings, and you don’t have a compliance officer to translate them into a checklist. The SRL Filing Accountability Assistant is built for exactly this gap.

The problem

Boutique firms carry the same disclosure obligations as a top-tier practice but without the infrastructure. When you take on a matter that began self-represented — or when you provide unbundled, limited-scope assistance to a litigant who is otherwise unrepresented — you inherit a filing history you didn’t draft, and you take on responsibility for what comes next. The Administrative Review Tribunal expects practitioners and parties to comply with its practice directions on the conduct of proceedings, including guidance touching on the use of generative AI in tribunal documents. For a six-person firm, two things go wrong:

• No standard intake: there’s no system for capturing what AI tools (if any) were used on earlier drafts the client brought in, and no way to assess what should be disclosed going forward.
• No pre-lodgement checkpoint: a junior or paralegal can run a draft through an LLM to tighten prose, and that fact never reaches the partner who signs the filing — let alone the tribunal that may need to be told.

The exposure is reputational, professional, and increasingly procedural. ART and federal courts are moving toward explicit disclosure regimes, and tribunals expect practitioners to know which regime applies before they file.

What the SRL Filing Accountability Assistant does

The SRL Filing Accountability Assistant is a pre-lodgement tool for filings where AI use — by the client, by an earlier representative, or by your own team — needs to be tracked, accounted for, and disclosed where required. It produces:

• An AI-use declaration record for each filing, capturing tool, scope of use, and reviewer sign-off
• A disclosure recommendation mapped to the applicable framework (ART practice directions for tribunal matters, GPN-AI for Federal Court)
• A citation and authority verification pass against Australian sources, so any case references AI may have hallucinated are caught before the document goes out
• A handover memo for matters inherited from SRLs, summarising what is known and unknown about prior AI use on the file

The assistant is built into the same local-first architecture as RuleCheck — Exegesis’s open-source pre-lodgement checker — meaning draft content is not shipped to external LLMs.

How it works

1. Upload the draft filing (.txt or .md) to the assistant via the RuleCheck interface.
2. Answer a short intake: who drafted it, what AI tools touched it, and the matter type (ART, Federal Court, state court).
3. Run the verification pass: citations are checked deterministically against an Australian authority registry; AI-use claims are logged.
4. Receive the accountability report: a markdown document containing the AI-use declaration, the disclosure recommendation tied to the relevant framework URL, citation status per authority, and any flagged content that should be reviewed before lodgement.
5. Archive the report alongside the matter file as your contemporaneous record of pre-filing diligence.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne boutique firms field a disproportionate share of ART matters — migration, NDIS, social security, veterans’ entitlements — where the other side, or your own client before you took the brief, was self-represented. The ART’s practice directions establish the expectations for how parties and representatives are to conduct themselves before the Tribunal, including emerging guidance on AI use. For a small firm without a dedicated compliance lead, the cost of getting AI disclosure wrong isn’t theoretical: it sits between an awkward conversation with a member of the Tribunal and a referral that takes a partner off fee-earning work for weeks. The accountability assistant is the cheapest control point — a checklist that runs before the filing leaves your office.

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
• RuleCheck by Exegesis (open-source pre-lodgement checker): https://github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist for the SRL Filing Accountability Assistant — Melbourne boutique firm access

We’re scoping pricing for small-firm access (per-filing vs. per-matter vs. firm-licence). Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when access opens — your intake will shape how the tier you sit in actually works.