SRL Filing Accountability Assistant for Perth Boutique Firms: Unbundled SRL Support Without the AI-Disclosure Risk

You run a boutique firm in Perth. A client walks in halfway through an Administrative Review Tribunal matter they started themselves — NDIS, migration, or veterans’ entitlements — and asks if you can ghost-draft a single submission, review their statement of facts, or sit behind them at a directions hearing. You want to help. The Tribunal expects honesty about who prepared the document and whether AI was used in its preparation. The client has been pasting bits of their case into a chatbot for weeks. The SRL Filing Accountability Assistant is built to sit between that mess and what actually gets filed.

The problem

Boutique firms in Perth are increasingly asked to provide unbundled or limited-scope assistance to self-represented litigants (SRLs), especially in Administrative Review Tribunal divisions where applicants begin pro se and seek help mid-matter. Two problems compound each other:

• SRLs routinely use consumer AI tools to draft submissions, witness statements, and chronologies — often without recording what was generated, what was edited, or what prompts were used.
• The ART’s practice directions on expert evidence and conduct expect parties (and their representatives) to be candid about how documents were prepared. A solicitor providing partial assistance can inherit responsibility for material the client generated with AI, with little visibility into how it was produced.

Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rule 19 requires candour to the court and tribunal. If your name appears on a covering letter, a notice of acting, or a filed submission, you carry the disclosure obligation — even if the body text was drafted by the client and a language model.

What the SRL Filing Accountability Assistant does

The SRL Filing Accountability Assistant is a structured intake and disclosure-preparation workflow for documents that will be filed by, or on behalf of, a self-represented litigant your firm is partially assisting. It produces:

• A per-document AI Use Provenance Record capturing what portions of the draft were AI-generated, AI-edited, or human-only, based on a structured intake from the SRL
• A draft AI-use disclosure paragraph suitable for inclusion in a covering letter or filing affidavit, framed to meet ART practice direction expectations
• A citation and authority check on any cases, sections, or legislative references the SRL has included — flagging hallucinated or misattributed authorities before they reach the Tribunal
• A scope-of-assistance note distinguishing what your firm drafted, reviewed, or did not touch — protecting the unbundled retainer

The agent does not draft substantive legal content. It captures, verifies, and structures disclosure.

How it works

1. Intake: The SRL (or the supervising solicitor on their behalf) uploads the draft document and answers a short structured questionnaire about how each section was prepared — fully human, AI-assisted, AI-generated then edited, or unverified.
2. Citation check: Every cited authority, statutory reference, and quoted passage is extracted and verified against the Australian authority registry (AustLII, Federal Court, High Court, state Supreme Courts) using RuleCheck’s deterministic verifier — no external LLM inference.
3. Provenance record generation: The agent produces a structured record mapping document sections to their preparation method, ready to file alongside the matter record.
4. Disclosure paragraph draft: A short, plain-language AI-use disclosure paragraph is generated for inclusion in the filing or covering correspondence, calibrated to ART practice direction expectations and ASCR Rule 19 candour obligations.
5. Scope note: A separate note records which parts of the document the assisting firm reviewed, drafted, or expressly did not review — supporting the unbundled retainer file.

Why this matters in Perth

Western Australian boutique firms are well-positioned to offer limited-scope assistance — it suits the cost sensitivities of regional clients and the volume of Commonwealth tribunal work flowing from WA. The Administrative Review Tribunal, which replaced the AAT in October 2024, publishes practice directions and guidance for parties and practitioners; those directions set expectations for how submissions and evidence are prepared and presented. Partial assistance is permissible, but it requires careful disclosure of what the practitioner did and didn’t do. When an SRL has used generative AI to prepare drafts you then touch, the disclosure question gets harder, not easier. A structured workflow that captures provenance at intake — before you put your name near the document — is the practical defence.

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
• 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
• AustLII (Australasian Legal Information Institute): https://www.austlii.edu.au/

Join the waitlist

The SRL Filing Accountability Assistant is in build. We are scoping access tiers for Perth boutique firms running unbundled ART work and want to hear how your retainer model handles AI-assisted client drafts.

Join the waitlist for the SRL Filing Accountability Assistant