Filing Verification Gateway for Perth Boutique Firms: Catch AI-Use Disclosure Gaps Before You File at the ART

You run a six-lawyer firm in Perth. One partner is finalising an expert report bundle for an ART matter due tomorrow; a junior is closing a Federal Court submission for a different client; the conveyancer next door has just asked whether a draft affidavit needs an AI-use disclosure. Nobody has a dedicated risk officer. Nobody has time to read every practice direction the morning of lodgement. The Filing Verification Gateway is the layer that sits between “draft finished” and “document filed” — and it runs the same way for every matter, on every lawyer’s machine, before anything leaves the office.

The problem

The Administrative Review Tribunal publishes practice directions and other guidance that govern how matters — including expert evidence — are conducted before it. For practitioners using generative AI in any part of drafting (whether for submissions, witness statements, or expert report preparation), disclosure expectations and accuracy obligations apply alongside the existing duties in the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules. The Federal Court’s GPN-AI sets a comparable bar in its jurisdiction. The risk for a boutique firm isn’t just one citation hallucination — it’s the absence of a repeatable pre-lodgement check that catches: undisclosed AI assistance, unverified authorities, formatting that breaches direction requirements, and expert evidence content that doesn’t meet the direction’s structural expectations. At firm scale of under ten lawyers, that check is usually whoever’s awake.

What the Filing Verification Gateway does

The Filing Verification Gateway is the orchestration layer of RuleCheck by Exegesis — the open-source filing checker for Australian legal teams. It runs a battery of deterministic checks on a draft filing before lodgement and returns a single readiness report. The checks include:

• Citation verification — every cited authority extracted and checked against an Australian authority registry (status: verified, mismatched, or not found)
• AI-use disclosure scan — flags drafts where AI assistance is likely and a disclosure statement is absent or boilerplate
• Practice-direction conformance — checks document structure against the rules for the lodgement venue (ART, Federal Court, state Supreme Courts)
• Expert evidence structure — for reports filed under expert evidence directions, surfaces missing sections (instructions, qualifications, basis of opinion)

The gateway is local-first and deterministic. It does not send draft content to external LLMs. RuleCheck is open source at github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck and live in beta at rulecheck.onrender.com.

How it works

1. Upload draft — one of your lawyers drops the .txt or .md filing draft into the RuleCheck interface (or the local CLI), and tags the lodgement venue (ART, FCA, WA Supreme Court).
2. Run the battery — the gateway runs citation extraction, disclosure scanning, structural conformance, and (for expert reports) section-presence checks in sequence. No model inference; deterministic rules and registry lookups only.
3. Read the readiness report — a markdown report lists every finding with severity (blocker, warning, info), the specific rule or direction touched, and a recommended action.
4. Resolve and re-run — fix the flagged items, re-upload, and verify a clean pass before lodgement.
5. Archive the report — keep the final clean report alongside the matter file as your governance audit trail.

Why this matters in Perth

A boutique Perth practice rarely splits work cleanly by jurisdiction. The same firm running an ART review for an NDIS or migration client this week may be in the Federal Court next week and the WA Supreme Court the week after. Each venue has its own practice direction expectations, and disclosure conventions for AI-assisted drafting are still settling. For a firm under ten lawyers, the realistic path to compliance isn’t a full-time risk function — it’s a deterministic gateway that runs the same checks every time, regardless of which partner drafted the document or what time of night it was finalised. The Filing Verification Gateway is built for exactly that shape of practice.

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
• RuleCheck by Exegesis (open source): https://github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck
• RuleCheck live beta: https://rulecheck.onrender.com

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when pricing and access tiers launch for Perth boutique firms

RuleCheck’s Filing Verification Gateway is live in beta. We’re scoping pricing tiers (per-filing, per-user monthly, or firm-licence) suited to firms under ten lawyers. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when access opens — and what we hear from you will shape the tier you sit in.