ART Expert Disclosure Autofill Agent for Melbourne Litigation Lawyers: Get the Expert Disclosure Right Before Filing

You’re running an ART matter from Melbourne. The expert report is in, the hearing date is locked, and the expert disclosure paperwork is sitting on your desk — the form that captures the expert’s qualifications, the questions they were asked, the documents they relied on, and whether any AI tools were used in preparing the opinion. Your matter management system already holds most of that information. Re-keying it into the ART’s expert disclosure templates is the kind of low-value, high-risk task that fails quietly: a missing AI-use declaration, an instruction omitted from the reliance list, a qualification copied from a stale CV. The ART Expert Disclosure Autofill Agent is built to remove that failure mode.

The problem

The Administrative Review Tribunal, which replaced the AAT on 14 October 2024, publishes practice directions and guidance materials that govern how expert evidence is presented before it. Expert disclosure obligations — what the expert was asked, what they relied on, their qualifications, and the disclosure of any AI tools used in forming or expressing the opinion — sit at the centre of those obligations. For litigation lawyers running ART matters, the form-filling itself is mechanical, but the consequences of mistakes are not: an incomplete disclosure can prompt directions hearings, force expert re-engagement, or expose the practitioner to scrutiny under the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules duty of candour. The risk is amplified by AI-use disclosure: where an expert (or a junior preparing the report) has used a generative tool to draft, summarise, or translate any part of the opinion, that use must be surfaced — and it is the lawyer filing the disclosure who carries the responsibility for getting it on the form.

What the ART Expert Disclosure Autofill Agent does

The agent reads your existing matter data — the expert’s CV, your letter of instruction, the document index for materials provided to the expert, and any AI-use questionnaire the expert has returned — and auto-completes the ART’s expert disclosure templates. It produces a draft disclosure document populated from primary matter records, flagged where source data is missing or stale, and ready for the responsible solicitor to review, sign, and lodge. The deliverable is the populated template plus an exception list of fields the agent could not confidently fill.

How it works

1. Ingest matter data. You point the agent at your matter folder or upload the source documents directly: expert CV, letter of instruction, brief index, expert AI-use questionnaire.
2. Map fields to the ART template. The agent maps source fields (qualifications, instructions, documents relied on, AI tools used) to the corresponding fields in the ART expert disclosure templates current at the date of run.
3. Autofill and flag gaps. Fields with a confident source mapping are populated. Fields with missing, ambiguous, or stale source data are left blank and listed in an exception report.
4. Produce the review pack. You receive the populated template, an exception list, and a provenance log showing which source document each field was drawn from.
5. Solicitor review and lodgement. A responsible solicitor reviews the draft, resolves the exception list, signs, and lodges through the standard ART channel. The agent does not lodge on your behalf.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne litigation teams running ART matters — migration, NDIS, social security, veterans’ affairs, taxation — typically run high matter volumes with tight directions timetables. Manual transcription of expert disclosure data scales badly, and the recent introduction of AI-use disclosure expectations means a field that didn’t exist on older AAT forms now needs to be answered for every expert report touched by a generative tool. Getting that field wrong — by omission or by default-answering “no” when an expert has in fact used AI for translation, summarisation, or drafting — is the failure mode the agent is designed to eliminate. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules duty of candour to the tribunal applies regardless of whether the omission was deliberate or administrative.

Sources

• Administrative Review Tribunal — Practice Directions and other guidance: https://www.art.gov.au/help-and-resources/professionals-and-practitioners/practice-directions-and-other-guidance
• Law Council of Australia — Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: https://lawcouncil.au/policy-agenda/regulation-of-the-profession-and-ethics/australian-solicitors-conduct-rules
• RuleCheck by Exegesis (open-source citation verifier): https://github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when access opens for Melbourne ART practitioners

The ART Expert Disclosure Autofill Agent is in build. We’re working with Melbourne litigation teams running ART matters at volume to scope the right integration points (matter management exports, document-index ingestion, expert AI-use questionnaires) and the right pricing shape. Join the waitlist and we’ll share progress and access details as the agent moves through beta.