Reasons Traceability & Escalation Agent for Perth In-House Counsel: Show Your Working When AI Touches a Reasons-for-Decision

A line in a draft set of reasons came back from your operations team last week. You don’t recognise the phrasing. You ask where it came from and get an answer you don’t love: “the model suggested it.” The decision is going out under a delegate’s name, will be reviewable on the merits, and is now sitting on your desk because someone — correctly — flagged that you can’t see the chain from instruction to wording to authority. The Reasons Traceability & Escalation Agent is built to make that chain visible before the decision leaves the building.

The problem

In-house teams in Perth are now routinely supporting decision-makers — internal review officers, delegates, statutory officers — whose reasons-for-decision drafts have been touched by a generative model at some point in the workflow. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules, which apply in Western Australia from 1 July 2022 as the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules, are a statement of professional and ethical obligations derived from solicitors’ duties as officers of the court, the common law and equity, and legislation. Those duties — candour, competence, supervision, honesty in dealings — don’t switch off when an AI tool drafts a paragraph. The practical problem is that when a reasons document is challenged or escalated, in-house counsel is expected to explain what the model did, what the human did, and which authority the reasoning rests on. If you can’t reconstruct that, the disclosure and supervision obligations get harder to defend.

What the Reasons Traceability & Escalation Agent does

The Reasons Traceability & Escalation Agent traces reasoning chains in AI-assisted reasons-for-decision documents, with a focus on administrative law and tribunal-bound decisions. It takes a draft set of reasons and produces a structured traceability record: which paragraphs were model-generated, which were human-edited, what authorities each conclusion claims to rely on, and where the chain breaks down or escalates an unsupported assertion. The objective is not to write the reasons — it is to make every claim in the reasons inspectable, so in-house counsel can sign off, push back, or escalate before the document is finalised.

How it works

  1. Ingest the draft. Counsel uploads the reasons-for-decision draft and any accompanying instructions or prompt history the decision-maker can supply.
  2. Segment and classify. The agent segments the document and classifies each passage as recital-of-facts, finding, application-of-law, or conclusion. Passages with model-origin markers are flagged.
  3. Extract authority claims. Every citation to legislation, case law, policy or guideline is extracted and routed through deterministic verification — the same approach used by RuleCheck, the open-source citation verifier at github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck — so authority references are checked against Australian sources rather than re-asked of a model.
  4. Build the traceability record. For each conclusion, the agent records the inputs it relied on, the authority chain, and any gap where a model output is not anchored to a verified source. Gaps trigger an escalation flag.
  5. Return an escalation report. Counsel receives a structured report listing verified conclusions, unsupported conclusions, and recommended escalation actions before the reasons are finalised.

Why this matters in Perth

Western Australia entered the Legal Profession Uniform Law regime on 1 July 2022, and the ASCR were adopted in WA as the professional conduct rules for solicitors from the same date. For in-house counsel in Perth — particularly those embedded in state agencies, statutory authorities, resources-sector compliance teams, and regulated utilities making reviewable decisions — the ASCR are the live obligations framework. The Rules are explicitly described by the Law Council as a commitment to peers, clients, courts and the broader public interest in the rule of law. Where a reasons document underpins a decision that may be reviewed by the State Administrative Tribunal or escalated to the Supreme Court of Western Australia, the in-house lawyer who certifies or settles those reasons carries the supervision and candour obligations in the ASCR regardless of whether a model drafted the first pass. A traceability record gives counsel something concrete to point to when asked how the reasons were produced.

Sources

Exegesis capability reference: 03_Agentic_Solutions/Reasons_Traceability_and_Escalation_Agent.md

Join the waitlist

The Reasons Traceability & Escalation Agent is a Tier 3 service shape in the Exegesis Legal stack, currently in scoping with a small group of in-house teams. Pricing and access tiers haven’t been finalised — we’re working out whether this lands as a per-matter, per-seat, or in-house-licence shape, and the waitlist is where we make that decision visible.

Join the waitlist for the Reasons Traceability & Escalation Agent →