In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent for Melbourne Litigation Lawyers: Catch Disclosure, Citation and Privilege Risks While You’re Still Writing
You’re three hours into a statement of facts and contentions for an ART matter. The expert report has been drafted with help from a model, the citations are a mix of hand-typed and pasted-from-AI, and the AI-use disclosure paragraph is on a sticky note you’ll add “before filing”. You won’t. Or you will, but the wrong version. The In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent watches the draft as you type and flags the three failure modes that bite litigation lawyers hardest right now: missing AI disclosure, citations that don’t resolve to a real authority, and passages that look like they leak privileged or confidential content.
The problem
Compliance checks at the end of a draft are too late. By the time the document goes to a senior associate or partner for sign-off, the AI-use disclosure paragraph that should accompany an expert report under the Administrative Review Tribunal’s expert evidence guidance has often been forgotten, or sits in the wrong section. Citations pasted from a chat session look correct on a fast skim and only fail when chambers checks them. Privileged material from a different matter — pulled in from a template or a prior brief — slips through because nobody re-reads the boilerplate. Each of these failures is preventable at the point of drafting, not at the point of lodgement.
The Administrative Review Tribunal’s practice directions and guidance for professionals and practitioners cover the use of expert evidence in proceedings before the Tribunal, including expectations on how expert material is prepared and disclosed. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules require candour to the tribunal (Rule 19) and protection of client confidences (Rule 9). Neither obligation pauses while you draft.
What the In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent does
The agent runs alongside your editor and produces non-intrusive nudges as content is written or pasted. It is scoped to three failure modes only:
- Missing or incomplete AI-use disclosure — when the draft contains markers of AI-assisted content (e.g. expert reports, long pasted blocks) but no corresponding disclosure paragraph in the expected section
- Dubious citations — case names, paragraph references and court designations that don’t resolve against an Australian authority registry, checked deterministically rather than by asking another model
- Privilege and confidentiality risks — passages that match patterns associated with prior-matter content, client identifiers from other files, or boilerplate that hasn’t been scrubbed
It does not rewrite your draft. It does not generate legal content. It flags, and you decide.
How it works
- Connect the agent to your drafting environment. The agent reads the current draft in a local context — no draft content is sent to external LLMs.
- Configure the matter profile. You tell the agent which forum the document is destined for (ART, Federal Court, state Supreme Court), which client matter it belongs to, and which prior matters are off-limits for content reuse.
- Draft as normal. As you type or paste, the agent runs deterministic checks: citation extraction against the authority registry, disclosure-section presence checks, and pattern matches for privileged content from other matters.
- Review nudges in a sidebar. Each nudge names the rule it relates to (e.g. ART expert evidence guidance, ASCR Rule 19, ASCR Rule 9), the location in the draft, and a recommended action.
- Generate a pre-lodgement summary. Before you file, the agent produces a markdown summary of nudges raised, nudges resolved, and any remaining risks — suitable for archiving with the matter file.
Why this matters in Melbourne
Melbourne litigation practice spans Federal Court, ART (which absorbed the AAT’s caseload), the Victorian Supreme Court, and a steady volume of expert-evidence-heavy administrative review matters. Expert reports prepared with AI assistance now routinely pass through Melbourne chambers, and the ART’s expert evidence guidance places the responsibility for disclosure and accuracy on the practitioner who tenders the report — not on the tool that helped draft it. Catching a missing disclosure paragraph or an unresolved citation at 4:30pm the day before a hearing is a different conversation to catching it as it’s typed. The In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent is designed for the second conversation.
The agent shares its citation-checking backbone with RuleCheck by Exegesis — the open-source, local-first, deterministic filing checker at github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck. The architecture is intentionally narrow: no external model inference, no draft content leaving the local environment, no generation of new legal content.
Sources
- Administrative Review Tribunal — Practice directions and other guidance for professionals and practitioners: https://www.art.gov.au/help-and-resources/professionals-and-practitioners/practice-directions-and-other-guidance
- Federal Court of Australia — Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Practice Note (GPN-AI): https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/law-and-practice/practice-documents/practice-notes/gpn-ai
- 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): https://github.com/andrefabre/rulecheck
Join the waitlist
We’re scoping the right pricing structure (per-user monthly, per-matter, or firm licence) based on demand from litigation teams running ART and Federal Court work. Join the waitlist and what we hear from you will shape the tier you sit in.