Legal AI, without the sales pitch

What actually goes wrong when Australian firms put AI into legal work, and what to do about it. New writing every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Practice · 14 August 2026

Billing for AI work: what to do when the task takes ten minutes

A research task that used to fill an afternoon now takes ten minutes, and the six minute unit does not know what to do about it. Here is how Australian firms are actually pricing the gap.

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Buying · 12 August 2026

What to ask a legal AI vendor before you sign

The demo always works. Here are the questions that separate a legal AI tool you can rely on from one that will quietly cost you a Friday afternoon.

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How it works · 10 August 2026

Retrieval vs recall: the line between safe and unsafe legal AI

Two AI tools can give you the same confident paragraph of legal analysis, and only one of them ever looked at the law. The difference is retrieval versus recall.

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Governance · 7 August 2026

How to write an AI policy your firm will actually follow

Most firm AI policies fail because they were written for the regulator instead of the person drafting at 6pm. Here is how to write one that survives contact with real practice.

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Confidentiality · 7 August 2026

PII anonymisation in legal work: what gets stripped, what stays

Stripping names and tax file numbers is the easy half. The occupation, the suburb, the date and the fact pattern are what actually identify your client.

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Buying · 5 August 2026

Why legal AI demos look perfect and your first matter does not

A demo is a controlled experiment on a solved question, your matter is neither, and the gap between them is predictable enough to test for before you sign.

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Confidentiality · 31 July 2026

How pasting a brief into a consumer chatbot can waive privilege

Privilege protects confidential communications, so the question is not whether you meant to share the brief, but whether pasting it into a chatbot was consistent with keeping it confidential.

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Risk · 29 July 2026

Shadow AI in law firms: the tools nobody approved

Your firm probably has no approved AI tool and plenty of AI use anyway. Here is what that costs you, and how to bring it into the open.

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Risk · 28 July 2026

Fake citations are now a costs order, not an embarrassment

Australian courts have stopped treating fabricated citations as an embarrassing slip. Indemnity costs have been ordered. Here is why the usual fix does not work.

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Buying · 28 July 2026

What legal AI actually costs once the research layer is in

The per-seat quote is the smallest number in a legal AI deal, and the research subscription underneath is usually the one that decides whether the maths works.

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