Expert AI Attestation Agent for Sydney Litigation Lawyers: Get Your Expert’s AI Use on the Record Before the ART Asks
Your expert’s report lands in your inbox the night before it’s due to the Administrative Review Tribunal. The methodology section is solid. Somewhere in the modelling, the expert used a language model to summarise a literature set, and a separate tool to draft the executive summary. Neither use is disclosed. You know the Tribunal expects experts to be candid about how their evidence was prepared, and you know your duty under the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules to not put forward evidence that misleads. You need a clean, ART-compliant attestation about the expert’s AI use — and you need it tonight. The Expert AI Attestation Agent is built for exactly that turnaround.
The problem
Expert evidence in ART proceedings (and across federal and NSW Supreme Court matters) increasingly involves AI-assisted preparation: literature triage, transcription, image analysis, drafting, statistical modelling. Practice directions and codes of conduct for experts have always required transparency about methodology, but the question of how AI use is disclosed — at what granularity, with which assurances about training data and human review — isn’t something most experts have a template for. Practitioners are left collecting ad-hoc statements that may not satisfy the Tribunal’s expectations or withstand cross-examination on the expert’s process.
Two compounding pressures make this acute in Sydney litigation work:
- ART proceedings move quickly and expert reports are often filed under tight deadlines, leaving no time to draft bespoke AI-use declarations from scratch
- Solicitors carry candour obligations under ASCR Rule 19 that don’t disappear because the AI use sat on the expert’s side of the workflow
A vague or missing AI-use statement is not just a procedural irritation — it’s a cross-examination surface and a potential basis for the Tribunal to give the evidence reduced weight.
What the Expert AI Attestation Agent does
The Expert AI Attestation Agent generates ART and court-compliant attestations for experts about their AI use in preparing evidence. You feed it the expert’s account of which tools were used, where in the workflow, and what human verification was applied. It returns a structured attestation suitable for annexure to the expert report — covering tool identity, purpose of use, inputs, outputs, human-in-the-loop review, and any limitations the expert wishes to record.
The agent is part of the Exegesis Legal stack and is designed to slot in alongside RuleCheck’s citation verification for filings where both the submission and the underlying expert evidence have been touched by AI.
How it works
- Intake: The instructing solicitor or expert completes a short structured interview describing each AI tool used, the stage of the workflow it was applied at, and the verification steps the expert performed on the output.
- Mapping to disclosure requirements: The agent maps the intake against the expected disclosure structure for ART expert evidence and the expert’s professional code of conduct.
- Draft attestation generation: A draft attestation is produced in the format conventionally used as an annexure to an expert report — declarative, dated, signed by the expert.
- Solicitor review: The instructing solicitor reviews the draft against the matter’s specific practice direction and any tribunal-specific guidance, and edits where the expert’s account needs clarification.
- Final issue and archive: The signed attestation is annexed to the expert report. A copy is retained in your matter file alongside the expert’s instructions, ready to produce if AI use is raised in cross-examination.
Why this matters in Sydney
Sydney litigation teams brief into the ART, the Federal Court (NSW Registry), the Supreme Court of NSW, and a range of NSW tribunals — each with its own practice directions on expert evidence and, increasingly, its own expectations about disclosure of AI involvement. The ART’s practice directions for expert evidence set the framework you’re working within for merits review matters. A pre-prepared attestation template that travels with every expert in your panel reduces the chance that an expert files a report with no AI-use statement and you only find out at hearing.
It also reduces the surface area for an ASCR Rule 19 candour problem: if the expert’s AI use is on the record, signed, and annexed, you’re not relying on the expert remembering to mention it in cross-examination.
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
- 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
Exegesis capability references:
Join the waitlist
We’re building this in close consultation with practitioners running expert evidence into the ART and NSW courts. Join the waitlist and tell us about the practice directions and expert panels you work with — your input shapes the templates we ship first.