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.
If an AI tool reads a document, that document can try to give the tool orders, and some tools will follow them.
Read the articleAI can tidy an affidavit in seconds, but every tidy phrase the deponent did not say is a gift to the cross-examiner and may breach court rules.
Read the articleBefore an AI note taker records your next client conference, check which surveillance law applies, who has to consent, and where the transcript ends up.
Read the articleCopilot does not break your SharePoint permissions, it uses them exactly as they are, and that is the problem for most firms.
Read the articleA staged, sceptic-friendly plan for getting legal AI into an Australian firm without handing every lawyer a login and hoping for the best.
Read the articleWhere AI earns its keep on an unfair dismissal or award file, where it gets the Fair Work detail wrong, and how to check its work before anything is filed.
Read the articleWhere AI saves real time on a wills and estates file, where it creates risk, and why the capacity assessment and the file note stay with the solicitor.
Read the articleA practical division of labour for property practices: the conveyancing tasks AI handles well, the ones it handles badly, and the ones that must stay with a person.
Read the articleA practitioner's view of the family law tasks where AI earns its keep, and the ones where it can quietly put a client, a child or your practising certificate at risk.
Read the articleFrom 10 December 2026, some firm privacy policies must explain how computer programs are used in decisions about people. This guide covers which AI uses trigger that duty and which do not.
Read the articleEquity partners who have never opened an AI tool rarely say no because of the technology. Here is what they actually object to, and how to run a proposal that answers it.
Read the articleA practical sequence for Australian solicitors and barristers when an AI-assisted error has already gone to the client.
Read the articleFour numbers tell you whether a legal AI tool is earning its place: real use on matters, time on a defined task, verification failures and write-offs.
Read the articleVendors say "we use a private model" as if it settles the confidentiality question. It answers one narrow part of it, and usually not the part that matters.
Read the articleA practitioner's breakdown of which contract clauses AI reviews reliably, which ones it gets confidently wrong, and where Australian statute quietly overrides good drafting.
Read the articleThere is no AI rule in the Uniform Law, and that is exactly why the existing duties on the court, confidentiality, supervision and costs do all the work.
Read the articlePointing an AI tool at your document management system does not give it a precedent library, and the difference shows up in every draft it produces.
Read the articleYour PI policy insures your judgment, not your software, so here is what a claims manager will look for if a machine draft goes wrong.
Read the articleA practical walk through the hops your client's matter text takes between your keyboard and an AI model, and which of those hops your retainer never contemplated.
Read the articleThe first draft was never grunt work, it was the training, so here is what to give a junior instead once the machine produces it in ninety seconds.
Read the articleTwo failure modes account for most bad AI legal answers in Australia: the state and Commonwealth boundary, and a model that quietly reverts to American law.
Read the articleA three word prompt strips out the jurisdiction, the issue and the purpose, which is everything that made the question worth asking.
Read the articleEvery Australian superior court now has something on the record about generative AI in filings, and they do not say the same thing. Here is what each one actually requires.
Read the articleA practical account of running technology assisted review over a large discovery set without losing control of privilege, proportionality or your own certificate.
Read the articleA practical script for solicitors fielding the question clients now ask outright: did a person actually write this, or did a machine?
Read the articleReal case, correct citation, dead law: the AI failure mode that survives a quick read, and the checks that catch it before it reaches the court.
Read the articleA practical buying guide for solo practitioners and small firms: which category of legal AI is worth paying for, what the pricing page leaves out, and how to trial a tool in a fortnight without risking a live matter.
Read the articleThere is no separate AI rule in Australian practice, and there does not need to be: competence, confidentiality and the duty to the court already cover it.
Read the articleAI drafting is fast, but the checking pass is the research done in reverse, and on some tasks it costs more than starting from scratch.
Read the articleA 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.
Read the articleThe 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.
Read the articleTwo 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.
Read the articleMost 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.
Read the articleStripping 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.
Read the articleA 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.
Read the articlePrivilege 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.
Read the articleYour 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.
Read the articleAustralian courts have stopped treating fabricated citations as an embarrassing slip. Indemnity costs have been ordered. Here is why the usual fix does not work.
Read the articleThe 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.
Read the article