Seven days to file a response. The decision-maker's account has shifted once already, between the initial investigation and the termination paperwork. There are six years of management notes to read. The applicant has named a protected workplace right, established the adverse action, and section 361 of the Fair Work Act has already moved the burden across the table. Before a single submission is framed, counsel must prove a negative: that the action was not taken for a prohibited reason.
The research task that follows is specific enough to be uncomfortable. She needs to know how courts have approached the "reason" requirement under section 340: what amounts to a reason, how the subjective inquiry into the decision-maker's state of mind is conducted, where the line falls between a genuine concurrent reason and post-hoc rationalisation, and how much evidentiary weight attaches to management documentation when credibility is contested. The High Court's treatment in Barclay v Board of Bendigo Regional Institute of Technical and Further Education [2012] HCA 32 is the foundation, but the Federal Court has built a substantial body of subsequent authority around it. The nuances of how that body of authority has developed are where the real work lives. Missing a line of cases that cuts against your characterisation, or failing to find the one that buttresses the decision-maker's account, can shape the outcome of a summary judgment application before the substantive hearing begins. And the timetable is already running.
She considers a general-purpose AI tool for the first sweep. The decision against it is not instinctive; it is reasoned. For a task where a single fabricated case reference can undermine an affidavit or a written submission, a tool that predicts fluent text across an undifferentiated corpus, ungrounded in Australian primary law and unable to trace a citation to a real source, carries active risk alongside its apparent convenience. The question is not whether it is fast. It is whether she can verify what it returns before she relies on it. For reverse-onus litigation, she cannot afford to find out the hard way.
So she runs a Research Assistant query on the section 361 causal nexus question instead. What comes back is the moment the file changes shape. A structured synthesis of the applicable authority: how courts have approached the decision-maker's subjective state of mind, where the Barclay two-stage inquiry has been refined in subsequent Federal Court decisions, how cases involving concurrent reasons and contested credibility have resolved. Each point tied to a source she can independently check. She runs a second query against the uploaded management notes and termination correspondence. A gap in the decision-maker's account surfaces on the screen, the kind of inconsistency that opposing counsel will find before she does if she does not find it first. It is early in the file. There is still time to advise the client on exposure, to decide whether to lead the decision-maker's account by affidavit or in oral examination, and to frame the characterisation of reasons before it gets locked into the written submissions.
Foundational research processes that used to take a full morning can now be completed in minutes. Habeas does not assess whether the evidence will hold under cross-examination, and it does not remove the professional obligation to verify each authority before it is relied upon. That is the right way to read it. What changes is the completeness of the research underpinning the judgment call, and how much of the timetable is left when she arrives at it.
The scale supporting that compression matters in this specific context. Habeas's Search Engine scans over 300,000 Australian cases and pieces of legislation in seconds, with results grounded in a closed dataset of legitimate Australian legal sources, so they are verifiable and traceable. For adverse action work under the Fair Work Act, the Australian-only scope is an asset. Reverse-onus litigation is jurisdiction-specific in ways that an undifferentiated overseas corpus cannot adequately serve, and the practitioner who needs to characterise a decision-maker's subjective state of mind in an Australian tribunal needs authorities from Australian courts, not analogies drawn from somewhere else.
If you are running an adverse action defence and want to test what a Research Assistant returns on the section 361 causal nexus question, run the query at habeas.ai.
The legal research in this article was conducted and every citation verified using Habeas, the Australian legal AI research platform.
Hero image: Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
