Dual-Forum Compliance Router for Perth In-House Counsel: Keep Federal Court and ART Disclosures Aligned
The regulator filed in the Federal Court last month. The same conduct is now under merits review in the Administrative Review Tribunal. You’re in-house, you’re the only lawyer across both matters, and the two forums have different disclosure regimes, different timetables, and different views on what’s privileged versus what’s discoverable. A statement made in one forum can land in the other. The Dual-Forum Compliance Router is built to stop a disclosure made in good faith in one proceeding becoming an inconsistency problem in the other.
The problem
Concurrent proceedings in two forums create a class of risk that single-matter workflows aren’t designed to catch. The Federal Court operates under its own rules, practice notes, and disclosure obligations. The Administrative Review Tribunal — which replaced the AAT on 14 October 2024 — runs on directions issued under its own procedural regime. When the same underlying conduct, the same documents, and often the same witnesses appear in both, the in-house lawyer carries the obligation to ensure that what’s said in one forum is consistent with what’s said in the other.
The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules (ASCR) frame this directly. Rule 19 imposes a duty of candour to the court. Rule 20 addresses the integrity of evidence. Rule 22 governs communications with opponents. None of these were drafted with dual-forum routing in mind, but all of them apply to every statement made in every forum. A misaligned position — even one created innocently by parallel drafting in two different teams — is the kind of inconsistency that becomes a cross-examination problem in the Federal Court and a credibility problem at the ART.
The practical failure mode is mundane: a paragraph in a tribunal statement of facts contradicts a paragraph in a Federal Court defence, nobody notices until the other side does, and the in-house lawyer is left explaining how the same legal entity said two different things.
What the Dual-Forum Compliance Router does
The Dual-Forum Compliance Router manages compliance when a matter runs concurrently in two forums (for example, Federal Court proceedings and Administrative Review Tribunal review of the same conduct). It maintains a single mapped position register — every factual assertion, every characterisation, every disclosure — and flags inconsistencies between what has been filed or stated in Forum A and what is about to be filed or stated in Forum B.
It does not replace the in-house lawyer’s judgement on what to disclose. It surfaces the conflicts before they reach the page.
How it works
- Forum registration. You configure the two active forums (e.g. Federal Court of Australia matter number + ART matter number) and the disclosure regime applicable to each.
- Position ingestion. Filed documents, witness statements, and correspondence from each forum are ingested into a structured position register. Each assertion is tagged by forum, date, document, and source paragraph.
- Cross-forum diff. When a new draft is added (a Federal Court submission, an ART statement of facts), the router compares its assertions against the existing register and flags conflicts, gaps, or characterisation drift.
- Disclosure routing check. Statements proposed for one forum are checked against the disclosure rules of the other — for example, whether a position taken in tribunal evidence creates a discovery obligation in the Federal Court matter.
- Reviewed output. You receive a routing report identifying each potential inconsistency, the source paragraphs in both forums, and the ASCR rule engaged.
Why this matters in Perth
Western Australia adopted the Legal Profession Uniform Law from 1 July 2022, and the ASCR applies in WA as the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules. For Perth in-house counsel — particularly those working in resources, energy, and financial services entities that face both Federal Court litigation and ART merits review of regulator decisions — the candour and integrity-of-evidence rules apply identically across forums, but the practical work of staying consistent across them sits with you.
Perth in-house teams often run leaner than their east-coast equivalents, with one or two lawyers carrying matters that would be split across multiple specialists in a larger office. The dual-forum routing problem is exactly the kind of work that gets compressed under that workload, and exactly the kind of work where a missed inconsistency becomes expensive.
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:
Join the waitlist
We’re scoping pricing around how many concurrent dual-forum matters an in-house team carries at once. Join the waitlist and tell us what your forum pairings look like — it shapes the tier you’ll sit in when access opens.