Technology and AI

Warned twice that his claim could not be heard, he filed more AI drafted submissions, and has been ordered to pay the employer's costs

By Staff Writer  |  29 August 2026

The Fair Work Commission has ordered a dismissed shop assistant to pay 1,230 Australian dollars towards his former employer's costs, a step the deciding member called very rare. Research commissioned by the same tribunal attributes part of a 40 per cent rise in its caseload to generative artificial intelligence, and from 20 October anyone who uses it to prepare a document must say so.

The case turned on one date and never moved off it. To bring an unfair dismissal claim against a larger employer in Australia, a worker must first complete a minimum employment period of six months, and the count stops on the day the employee is notified rather than on the day the dismissal takes effect or the notice period ends. The applicant started on 29 September 2025 and was told on the afternoon of 26 March 2026, three days short. He lodged his claim the same night. The submissions he filed, drafted with artificial intelligence, argued that his employment ran into April and therefore cleared the six month mark.

He was told otherwise, early and more than once. Two days after he filed, staff wrote to say the tribunal might have no power to hear the case at all. On 31 July 2026 the deputy president deciding the matter wrote to him twice, quoting the legislation in plain English and explaining that it made no difference when his notice pay arrived or when the job formally ended. One of those emails told him there was a very strong likelihood that his case would not win, invited him to withdraw and warned that carrying on could expose him to a costs order. He filed further submissions on the same point. At the hearing on 5 August he conceded and withdrew, and his former employer asked for the cost of preparing for a hearing it said should never have been needed.

What was actually penalised

Not the use of a machine to draft. The decision records that the final submission was not wholly invented material, because the authorities it cited were real rather than fabricated. What drew the order was continuing after 31 July, once the difficulty had been spelled out in terms a person without legal training could follow. The bill was held to regulated maximum rates: two hours for the hearing book, four for the hearing itself.

I have taken the very rare step of ordering him to pay some of the employer's legal costs, because his unreasonable conduct caused his former employer to incur those costs unnecessarily.

Michael Easton, Deputy President of the Fair Work Commission

The deputy president added that if the applicant had properly read his own machine generated replies he would have known that his case was doomed, and closed with the observation that there had been no winner in the matter. The employer spent well beyond the sum recovered.

A disclosure duty from 20 October

On 24 August the tribunal's president published a guidance note on the use of generative artificial intelligence in its cases, with a research report on how applicants are using it. The note takes effect on 20 October and imposes three duties on anyone using such a tool to prepare a document: say when and how it was used; check that the document is correct and relevant to the case; and, for a witness statement or declaration, check that it rests on your own knowledge, uses your own words and is true so far as you know. The forms are being rewritten before that date to carry the questions.

The research behind it is worth reading twice. The caseload rose by 40 per cent between 2023-24 and 2024-25, a rise put down in part to these tools rather than to any change in the labour market. Artificial intelligence appeared in 40 per cent of the cases surveyed, more than three quarters of those litigants reached for one general purpose assistant, and 60 per cent of them used its free version. People who did not speak English as a first language were twice as likely to use one.

The tribunal did not treat any of that as a problem in itself. It accepted that these tools are opening its doors to applicants with genuine claims who might otherwise have been put off, and that the more careful users treat them as one instrument among several. A computer science lecturer at Macquarie University, Gregory Baker, ran his own claim with a set of such agents and became the first person to succeed in a challenge to Australia's casual employment laws.

The order is worth six hours of a solicitor's time. The proposition behind it will outlast the sum: a party owns what it files, whatever drafted it, and a tribunal that has put its reading of the statute in writing is entitled to be read.