Expert Report Provenance Agent for Brisbane Firm Principals: Know What’s AI-Generated, What’s Human-Edited, and What Your Expert Can Defend Under Cross-Examination

Your expert witness in a Brisbane commercial matter has delivered a 90-page report. The opening narrative reads smoothly. The methodology section is dense. The conclusions cite three damages models. Somewhere in there are passages an LLM helped draft, passages the expert wrote from scratch, and passages a junior analyst edited overnight. Under cross-examination, opposing counsel will ask: “Did you personally author this paragraph?” As the instructing principal, you carry the candour obligation to the court for what was filed under your firm’s name. The Expert Report Provenance Agent is built so that question has a defensible answer before the report leaves your office.

The problem

Expert evidence is now routinely drafted with AI assistance — for transcription, summarisation, drafting of background sections, even structuring of opinions. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules don’t carve out an exception when the document under a solicitor’s name was assembled with model assistance. Rule 19 (duty to the court) and the broader obligation not to mislead extend to expert reports filed in proceedings the firm conducts. The practical difficulty is operational: by the time a 90-page report lands on your desk, there is no reliable way to know which sections were AI-generated and untouched, which were AI-drafted and human-edited, and which were authored entirely by the expert. Without that record, the expert cannot answer attribution questions on the stand with confidence, and you cannot certify what you filed.

The threat — expert evidence AI attribution failure — is the gap between what the expert believes they authored, what was actually generated by a model, and what the court is told. Once that gap is exposed in cross-examination, the report’s evidentiary weight collapses, and the firm’s conduct in filing it becomes the next question.

What the Expert Report Provenance Agent does

The Expert Report Provenance Agent tracks the provenance of every section of an expert report — what was AI-generated, what was human-edited, what was authored from scratch. It produces a per-section provenance ledger that travels with the report through drafting, instructing-solicitor review, and pre-filing certification.

The deliverable is a structured provenance record covering:

• Section-level classification: human-authored, AI-generated, AI-assisted (edited by a human), or unknown
• Edit history per section — who touched it, when, and at what stage
• A pre-filing provenance report suitable for the instructing solicitor’s file and, if required, for disclosure
• A signed-off version the expert can refer to if attribution is challenged in evidence

The agent is designed for the principal who has to sign off on what gets filed — not for the expert in isolation.

How it works

1. Ingest the working draft. The expert (or their team) uploads each iteration of the report into the agent — typically .docx or markdown. Earlier drafts and any LLM-assisted segments are tagged at ingestion.
2. Classify each section. The agent segments the document and labels each section as human-authored, AI-generated, AI-assisted, or unknown, based on the upload history and any explicit tagging from the expert’s drafting environment.
3. Build the provenance ledger. A per-section ledger records the classification, the contributing authors, the date of last substantive edit, and any flagged segments where provenance cannot be determined.
4. Surface the unknowns. Sections where provenance is ambiguous are flagged for the expert to resolve before the report is finalised — re-author, confirm, or remove.
5. Issue the pre-filing report. The instructing principal receives a provenance report alongside the final expert report. The record sits on the matter file so attribution questions in evidence can be answered against a contemporaneous source.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Queensland adopted the Australian Solicitors Conduct Rules in June 2012, and ASCR Rule 19 (duty to the court and the administration of justice) binds Brisbane solicitors with the same force as in any uniform-law jurisdiction. Commercial and class-action work in the Brisbane registries of the Federal Court and the Supreme Court of Queensland increasingly turns on expert evidence — accounting, valuation, engineering, medical. Firm principals carrying the candour obligation for filings made in their firm’s name cannot delegate that obligation to the expert. A provenance record is the operational answer to a duty that the ASCR places on the solicitor, not the witness.

Sources

• Law Council of Australia — Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: https://lawcouncil.au/policy-agenda/regulation-of-the-profession-and-ethics/australian-solicitors-conduct-rules

Exegesis capability references:

• Expert Report Provenance Agent spec
• RuleCheck by Exegesis (open-source citation verifier)

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when the Expert Report Provenance Agent opens for Brisbane firm principals

The Expert Report Provenance Agent is on the Exegesis roadmap. We’re scoping pricing structure (per-report, per-matter, or firm-licence) with a small group of design partners. Join the waitlist and we’ll bring you into the conversation as access opens.