Chain of Custody Governance Log for Brisbane In-House Counsel: Prove What the Expert Wrote and What the Model Touched
Your external expert delivered a 60-page report last Thursday. Discovery is next month. Opposing counsel has already flagged, in correspondence, that they will be probing the extent to which generative AI was used in the report’s preparation — which sections, which prompts, which model, which version. Your expert says “I used it for tidying language, nothing substantive.” You have no artefact that can defend that claim under cross-examination. The Chain of Custody Governance Log is built so that, by the time the report reaches the brief, every evidentiary input has a tamper-evident record of who and what produced it.
Why it matters now
The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules — adopted in Queensland as the Australian Solicitors Conduct Rules from June 2012 — bind solicitors to duties of candour to the court (Rule 19) and to honesty and competence in their dealings on behalf of clients. When in-house counsel instruct external experts whose work product will be tendered as evidence, the duty to the court extends through that chain. If an expert report includes content generated, drafted or materially shaped by a language model and that involvement is not disclosed when relevant, the resulting tender risks misleading the court about the provenance of the opinion being given. Cross-examination of experts on their methodology now routinely includes questions about AI tool use. Without a contemporaneous record showing what was authored, what was AI-assisted, and what was AI-generated then verified by the expert, the in-house team carries the cost of reconstructing provenance from memory and email threads — usually under time pressure, sometimes in the witness box.
The 5-minute view
- Expert evidence AI attribution failure is the inability to demonstrate, after the fact, which portions of an evidentiary artefact were produced by a human author and which were generated or materially shaped by an AI tool
- The ASCR imposes duties of candour and honesty that flow through to how in-house counsel manage the provenance of evidence prepared by external experts and consultants
- Standard email-and-shared-drive workflows do not produce a defensible chain of custody for AI-assisted artefacts — version history alone does not record prompts, model identity, or human review steps
- The Chain of Custody Governance Log records each evidentiary artefact from collection or commissioning through to final lodgement, with each event signed and timestamped
- Each entry captures: artefact identifier, custodian, action (drafted, AI-assisted, reviewed, verified, finalised), tool used (if any), and reviewer attestation
- The log is append-only and tamper-evident, so the record presented at discovery is the record that existed at the time of the event
- Designed to be produced as an exhibit or annexure where the provenance of an expert artefact is challenged
What Exegesis is building
The Chain of Custody Governance Log is part of the Exegesis Legal agent stack (catalogued at 03_Agentic_Solutions/Chain_of_Custody_Governance_Log.md). It is a tier-3 governance service: a structured, immutable ledger that sits alongside the matter file and records every custody event for designated evidentiary artefacts. The log is local-first — entries are written to a hash-chained store held by the in-house team — and integrates with RuleCheck (the open-source pre-lodgement verifier at github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck) so that when an artefact is finalised, its citations are checked and the verification result is itself recorded as a custody event. No artefact content is sent to external LLMs; the log records metadata and attestations, not the substance of the underlying material. That separation is deliberate — the governance layer should not become a new disclosure liability of its own.
The deliverable
- A configured Chain of Custody Governance Log instance scoped to your matter or evidentiary programme
- Custody event schema covering: collection, commissioning, drafting, AI assistance (with tool and version), human review, verification, finalisation, lodgement
- Hash-chained, append-only storage with per-event signatures from the responsible custodian
- Export format suitable for production as an annexure or exhibit, with cryptographic verification instructions for the receiving party
- Integration hook for RuleCheck citation verification results to be recorded as custody events
- Operating guide for in-house teams and instructed experts covering when to log, what to log, and how the log is produced on request
Why this matters in Brisbane
Queensland solicitors are bound by the Australian Solicitors Conduct Rules as adopted in 2012, and Queensland Supreme Court practice expects practitioners to be able to account for the provenance of material tendered as evidence. Brisbane in-house teams instructing experts — particularly in commercial disputes, regulatory proceedings, and matters before the Federal Court’s Queensland registry — increasingly receive correspondence that pre-emptively asks about AI use in report preparation. A documented chain of custody removes the question from the realm of recollection and places it where it belongs: in a contemporaneous, verifiable record.
CTA
The Chain of Custody Governance Log is in scoping. We’re working with a small group of in-house counsel to finalise the event schema and integration pattern with external experts. Join the waitlist to be invited into that group, and to be told first when access and pricing open.
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: