Expert Evidence AI Attribution Agent for Brisbane Firm Principals: Make Expert Outputs Auditable Before They Reach Affidavit

An expert report lands on your desk on a Friday afternoon. The opinions are clear, the methodology section is tidy, and the conclusions support the matter. Your junior asks the question you didn’t want to hear: did the expert use a language model anywhere in the analysis — and if so, where, and on what inputs? You can’t answer it from the document. Neither can the expert, three days later, with any precision. Under the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules, you are the one who has to stand behind what gets filed. The Expert Evidence AI Attribution Agent exists to remove that ambiguity before the affidavit is sworn.

The problem

Expert evidence in Australian litigation increasingly passes through generative tools — translation, summarisation, data extraction, draft prose, even calculation scaffolding. Most experts don’t keep a clean record of where a model was used, what was prompted, and what was edited afterwards. As the firm principal instructing the expert, you carry duties under the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: candour to the court (Rule 19), supervision of the matter, and the obligation to only give effect to client instructions consistent with your duties as an officer of the court. If an expert’s report contains AI-derived content that wasn’t disclosed, mischaracterised, or can’t be reconstructed under cross-examination, it is your firm that wears the consequence — not just the expert. The exposure isn’t theoretical: it’s the affidavit you’ve already filed.

What the Expert Evidence AI Attribution Agent does

The agent attaches verifiable attribution metadata to expert evidence outputs. Each section of an expert’s report is tagged with a structured record of what produced it: human-authored, model-assisted (with model identifier and prompt class), or transformed from a source document (with source reference). The attribution layer is generated alongside the report, not retrofitted, so the expert can sign off on a deterministic record at the same time they sign the report itself. When you brief counsel or the expert is cross-examined, the attribution log is available as a discrete exhibit — not a recollection.

How it works

  1. The expert installs the attribution agent in their drafting environment before work on the report begins. No drafts leave their machine.
  2. As the expert writes, edits, prompts a model, or pastes from a source, the agent records the provenance event — author, action, model identifier (if any), input class, and timestamp — against the section of the document affected.
  3. On completion, the agent produces an Attribution Manifest: a structured, human-readable record mapping every paragraph of the final report to its provenance trail.
  4. The Manifest is exported alongside the report and provided to the instructing solicitor with the signed expert evidence, ready to accompany the affidavit or be produced on request.
  5. Optional: the Manifest is verified against the final report text using RuleCheck’s deterministic checks (github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck) so that unattributed content is flagged before lodgement.

Why this matters in Brisbane

The ASCR were adopted in Queensland in June 2012 and remain the binding professional conduct framework for Brisbane solicitors. Rule 19 (duty to the court) and the broader supervisory duties of a principal apply equally to evidence prepared by an external expert under your instruction. Queensland litigation — commercial, personal injuries, planning and environment, family — runs on expert evidence, and Brisbane firms are now routinely instructing experts who use AI tools as part of their workflow. The Law Council is actively reviewing the ASCR (the 2026 review is open) and the direction of professional regulation is towards more, not less, accountability for AI-assisted output. A firm principal who can produce a clean attribution record for every expert report filed is in a materially different position to one who cannot.

Sources

Join the waitlist

The Expert Evidence AI Attribution Agent is in design with a small group of Brisbane firm principals and the experts they regularly instruct. We’re scoping deployment models (per-matter, per-expert, firm panel licence) and the integration surface for common drafting environments.

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when access opens for Brisbane firm principals

What we hear from waitlist members will shape how the attribution manifest is structured and how the agent slots into the way your experts already work.