In today’s legal landscape, precision, speed, and credibility aren’t just advantages, they’re necessities. Few understand this better than Laina Chan, a seasoned barrister turned tech innovator, who is now co-founder and CEO of MiAI Law. With years of courtroom experience and a Harvard Business School background, Chan has built a platform that promises to change how lawyers approach research and strategy.
For Chan, the leap from litigation to legal tech was less about abandoning one world and more about evolving it. “The biggest limitation is human capacity,” she explains. “Even the most capable lawyer has limited time and memory. Clients don’t want to pay endlessly for research, and historical knowledge gets outdated.”
That limitation inspired MiAI Law, a system that doesn’t just search through Australia’s extensive case law but analyzes it. By extracting key information and structuring it into an intelligent database, the platform can generate comprehensive, accurate reports within minutes. Judges themselves, Chan notes, have said they would use it to verify submissions, a strong endorsement of its reliability.
What sets MiAI Law apart is its reasoning engine. Unlike traditional tools that rely on commentary or precedent summaries, the platform reasons from first principles. “It extracts rules directly from cases and legislation and applies them step by step to new scenarios,” Chan says. She cites an example involving CCTV footage requested by police: the system retrieved the latest privacy legislation, applied it systematically, and provided a transparent explanation of why disclosure was lawful.
This transparency is central to Chan’s vision. Every conclusion is footnoted with pinpoint references, and every step of the reasoning is revealed. There is no “black box,” only verifiable, defensible logic. For lawyers, that means confidence in their submissions and a stronger foundation for argument.
Behind the technology is a team of 21, many of whom trained at India’s prestigious IIT. Their shared commitment to excellence drives the platform’s development. “Excellence is our core value,” Chan emphasizes. “Everyone pushes hard because we know we’re building something groundbreaking.”
From the courtroom to the codebase, Chan’s career reflects a single mission: to simplify complexity and elevate legal practice. MiAI Law is not about replacing lawyers but about empowering them, equipping practitioners with tools to think faster, verify thoroughly, and argue with greater authority.
In an industry where credibility is currency, Laina Chan is proving that legal AI can be both transparent and transformative.
