Expert Report Provenance Agent for Perth Litigation Lawyers: Know Which Paragraphs of an Expert Report Were Written by a Model

Your expert returned the report on a Friday afternoon. It reads cleanly — almost too cleanly. You know the expert uses an AI assistant for drafting, because most do now. What you don’t know, paragraph by paragraph, is which sentences are the expert’s own reasoned opinion, which are AI-rephrased versions of their notes, and which are model output the expert glanced at and approved. Under the Administrative Review Tribunal’s expert evidence directions and ART’s practice guidance for professionals and practitioners, the expert’s opinion must be their own — and you’re the one who has to be able to say so under cross-examination. The Expert Report Provenance Agent is built to give you that paragraph-level audit before the report is tendered.

The problem

Expert reports are no longer drafted in a single hand. A specialist dictates rough notes, an assistant runs them through a generative model to tighten structure and language, the expert reviews and signs. The process is fast and the output is fluent — and it is precisely the fluency that creates the risk. When a paragraph reads like a confident statement of opinion, you cannot tell from the page whether the expert formed the view or whether the model proposed the wording and the expert agreed. ART’s expert evidence practice direction requires that opinions in expert reports be the expert’s own and that the basis for the opinion be transparent. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules (Rule 19) require candour to the tribunal, which extends to evidence you put on. The Federal Court’s GPN-AI sets a parallel expectation in federal proceedings: practitioners are responsible for the accuracy and integrity of AI-touched material in court documents. None of these frameworks prohibit AI assistance in expert drafting. They require that you can account for it. Without a provenance record, you cannot.

What the Expert Report Provenance Agent does

The Expert Report Provenance Agent tracks the provenance of every section of an expert report — what was AI-generated, what was human-edited, and what was original to the expert. It produces a paragraph-level map you can attach to the matter file, so that if the report is challenged at hearing you can show how each opinion in it was authored.

The deliverable:

• A per-paragraph provenance ledger covering the full report
• Classification per paragraph: expert-original, expert-edited, AI-drafted-and-approved, AI-generated-unedited
• A summary table identifying the proportion of the report in each class
• A flag list of paragraphs that present as opinion but have AI-generated provenance — the ones a cross-examiner is most likely to pick at
• A markdown report archivable alongside the brief and disclosable if directions require it
• A governance audit entry recording when the analysis was run and against which draft

How it works

1. The expert (or their instructing solicitor) uploads draft revisions of the report and the final signed version through the RuleCheck interface.
2. The agent diffs revisions to reconstruct authorship sequence — which paragraphs appeared first, which were rewritten between drafts, which were inserted late.
3. Where the expert’s drafting environment exports authorship metadata (e.g., AI-assist logs from supported tools), the agent ingests it directly. Where it does not, the agent classifies paragraphs on stylistic and structural signals and marks them as inferred rather than confirmed.
4. The agent produces the provenance ledger and the flag list, ranked by the litigation risk of the paragraph (opinion statements ranked higher than background or methodology).
5. You receive a markdown report you can review with the expert before finalising, and archive with the brief.

The agent runs locally. No draft expert evidence is sent to an external LLM.

Why this matters in Perth

WA litigation lawyers brief experts across Federal Court, Supreme Court of Western Australia, and ART matters — and the rules of expert evidence travel with the report into whichever forum it lands. The ART expert evidence practice direction applies to reports tendered in tribunal proceedings; Federal Court GPN-AI applies to federal filings; the WA Supreme Court rules govern expert evidence in state matters. A Perth practice running interstate and federal work cannot maintain a different provenance posture per forum. The Expert Report Provenance Agent gives you one paragraph-level record that holds up across all of them, before the report becomes the subject of an objection you cannot answer.

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
• 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
• AustLII (Australasian Legal Information Institute): https://www.austlii.edu.au/

Exegesis capability references:

• RuleCheck by Exegesis — open-source citation verifier
• Expert Report Provenance Agent spec

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when access opens for Perth litigation teams

The Expert Report Provenance Agent is in build. We’re scoping access tiers (per-report, per-matter, firm-licence) with early users. Join the waitlist and what you tell us about how your experts actually draft will shape the tier you sit in.