Generative AI can draft a chronology, summarise a bundle of discovery, or tidy a set of submissions in minutes. Australian courts have noticed, and several have now published rules on how AI may and may not be used in matters before them. If your firm uses Claude or any other AI tool to help prepare court documents, those rules decide what is safe to file and what could put a solicitor in front of a regulator. Here is a practical rundown for 2026, and the checks worth building into your process now.
The courts have already written the rules
This is no longer a grey area. The Supreme Court of New South Wales has had a generative AI practice note in force since early 2025 that sets hard limits on where AI output can appear in a proceeding. The Supreme Court of Victoria has issued guidelines for litigants on the responsible use of AI. Queensland, the Federal Court, and other jurisdictions have published their own guidance for practitioners and self-represented parties. The detail differs by court, so the first rule is the simplest one: read the current practice note for the specific court and division your matter sits in, because these documents are being revised often as the technology moves.
Across the jurisdictions, a few themes repeat. Courts draw a firm line around evidence, they expect every citation to be verified by a person, and they treat confidential or suppressed material as something that must never be pasted into a public AI tool. If your process respects those three ideas, you are most of the way to compliance in any Australian court.
Five checks before an AI-assisted document is filed
Evidence is off-limits. Most Australian courts prohibit using generative AI to produce the content of affidavits, witness statements, or anything meant to reflect a person’s own knowledge. AI can help with structure or formatting, but the substance of evidence must come from the witness.
Every citation is real and says what you claim. Treat AI-drafted case law and legislation as unverified until a person has opened the judgment and read it. Fabricated authorities are the single most common way firms have been caught out.
Nothing confidential goes into a consumer tool. Client information, privileged material, and anything under a suppression or non-publication order should never be entered into a public AI service. This is both a court rule and a Privacy Act exposure.
Disclosure obligations are met. Some courts expect parties to disclose when and how AI was used, particularly for expert reports. Check whether your matter requires it and note it before you file.
A named person has signed off. A supervising solicitor should review and take responsibility for any AI-assisted document. The duty to the court sits with the practitioner, not the model.
The fabricated-citation trap
The most public failures have all looked the same. A tool invents a case that sounds plausible, the citation is copied into a list of authorities, and nobody checks it before the document is filed. In 2024 an Australian solicitor was referred to a state legal services regulator after a court found that authorities put before it did not exist. The professional consequences are real, and so is the money. A single fabricated citation can trigger a wasted-costs argument, a complaint, and days of re-drafting. For a mid-sized commercial matter, that clean-up can run past $45,000 once you count counsel’s time, the redo, and the damage to the client relationship. The verification step that would have prevented all of it takes a few minutes.
The lesson is not that AI has no place in litigation. It is that AI output is a draft, never a filing, until a person has checked it against primary sources.
How to use Claude without breaching the rules
Used with care, Claude is well suited to the parts of litigation work that are safe to speed up: summarising long documents you already hold, drafting a first-pass chronology, and pressure-testing an argument before you commit to it. The controls that keep this compliant are mostly about process, not technology.
Keep confidential matter out of consumer tools. Run sensitive work through a firm-controlled deployment where inputs are not used for training and access is logged.
Build a citation-check gate. No authority reaches a document until a person has opened the judgment. Make it a required step, not a good intention.
Keep an audit trail. Record where AI was used so a supervising solicitor, and if needed the court, can see it clearly.
Train the team on the specific court rules. The rules vary by jurisdiction and change over time, so a one-off memo is not enough.
At Automata AI, a Sydney-based Claude consultancy, we help firms set up exactly this: a compliant way to use Claude that respects client confidentiality, keeps a person in the loop, and holds up against the court rules that apply to your practice. If you want to work out where AI can safely save your team time, you can book a short brainstorm with us.
This article is general information for Australian firms, not legal advice, and the court rules referenced here change regularly. Always check the current practice note or guideline for the court and division your matter is in before you rely on any AI-assisted document.
