Frontier 2026 SRL Disclosure & Accountability Assistant for Perth Boutique Firms: Help Self-Represented Litigants Disclose AI Use Without Becoming Their Lawyer
You run a five-lawyer firm in West Perth. A community legal centre you partner with on duty rosters keeps sending you the same problem: self-represented litigants are turning up to Administrative Review Tribunal hearings with submissions and “expert reports” generated by a chatbot, no disclosure attached, and no idea that the Tribunal expects them to say so. The CLC can’t draft for them. You can’t represent them pro bono on every matter. But somebody has to translate the disclosure expectation into something a litigant-in-person can actually produce — before the AI-use issue becomes a credibility issue for the entire bench appearance.
The problem
The Administrative Review Tribunal’s practice directions on expert evidence and the conduct of proceedings place obligations on parties — including self-represented parties — to be candid about how material before the Tribunal was prepared. When a self-represented litigant uses a generative AI tool to draft submissions, draft witness statements, or generate what they believe is “expert” analysis, two failures stack on top of each other: the content itself may contain hallucinated authorities or fabricated reasoning, and the AI involvement is not disclosed. The Tribunal, the other party (often a Commonwealth agency with counsel), and any decision-maker on review are then working with a record they can’t properly weigh.
For a Perth boutique firm doing CLC-referred work or limited-scope ART matters, the cost of triaging this manually — sitting with a litigant, asking what they used, helping them draft a disclosure paragraph that doesn’t accidentally waive privilege or misstate facts — is unrecoverable. Most firms quietly stop taking the referrals.
What the Frontier 2026 SRL Disclosure & Accountability Assistant does
The Assistant is a self-represented litigant disclosure aid, designed for deployment through community legal centres and boutique firms that support them. It walks a litigant-in-person through a structured intake — what AI tools they used, at what stage, for what content — and produces a plain-English AI-use disclosure statement the litigant can attach to their ART filing. It does not draft submissions. It does not give legal advice. It produces one artefact: a disclosure paragraph that names the tool, names the use, and names what the litigant did (or did not) verify.
The narrow scope is the point. The litigant remains self-represented. The CLC retains its limited-scope posture. The boutique firm reviewing the output is reviewing a disclosure statement, not ghost-writing a case.
How it works
- Intake. The litigant answers a structured set of questions about which AI tools they used, when in the process, and what outputs they incorporated into their ART materials.
- Categorisation. The Assistant classifies each use — drafting prose, summarising documents, generating purported authorities, producing “expert” analysis — against the categories the ART practice directions treat as material.
- Verification prompts. For any cited authority or factual claim sourced from an AI tool, the Assistant flags that the litigant must independently verify it before filing, and points to AustLII and the relevant Tribunal registry.
- Disclosure draft. The Assistant produces a plain-English disclosure paragraph suitable for inclusion in the litigant’s filed materials, naming the tool, the use, and the verification status.
- Firm review handoff. The disclosure and the intake record are packaged for a supervising solicitor at the partnering boutique firm or CLC to review in under ten minutes before the litigant lodges.
Why this matters in Perth
Perth’s ART caseload — migration, NDIS, Centrelink, veterans’ entitlements — leans heavily on self-represented applicants, and Western Australia’s community legal sector covers a geography that makes in-person triage expensive. Boutique firms in West Perth, Fremantle and Joondalup that partner with CLCs absorb a disproportionate share of the AI-use disclosure problem because there are fewer large-firm pro bono programmes to share the load. A tool that produces a defensible disclosure artefact in minutes — and keeps the firm’s role narrow and reviewable — is the difference between continuing CLC partnership work and quietly winding it back.
The Assistant does not replace the supervising solicitor’s judgement. It removes the unbillable hour that currently sits between a litigant’s ChatGPT output and a Tribunal-ready disclosure.
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 citation verifier): https://github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck
- Frontier 2026 SRL Disclosure & Accountability Assistant — catalog spec:
03_Agentic_Solutions/Frontier_2026_SRL_Disclosure_and_Accountability_Assistant.md
Join the waitlist
We’re scoping deployment with community legal centres and the boutique firms that supervise their AI-use disclosure workflows. Tell us your caseload shape and we’ll let you know when access opens — and what we hear from you will shape how the tool gets configured for ART matters specifically.