AI can support judgment, but it must never obscure it – MiAI Law is designed to strengthen professional reasoning, not replace it.
Practising barrister and Business School Executive Education alumna Laina Chan is disrupting the traditional legal profession. Laina has developed a risk management tool after recognising a structural gap in existing legal research tools. She initially developed MiAI Law for her own legal practice to plug this gap.
“There was no AI system that embedded legal reasoning into its architecture,” Laina explains. “Law is not just retrieval. It is reasoning from facts and principles. MiAI Law is built to follow that same discipline.”
Unlike generic AI tools trained to generate answers, MiAI Law reports are constructed from case law and legislation from the bottom up. It produces structured, verifiable and auditable analyses.
“Most tools can locate a case or statute,” Laina says. “But they don’t show you why it matters, how it connects, or where the reasoning may fail. MiAI Law delivers transparent, methodical reports that lawyers can verify and test.”
Strong market validation
MiAI Law officially launched in March this year. This came after extensive beta testing with lawyers from small practices to international firms and barristers’ chambers. That launch followed strong early market validation. Laina raised AU$2 million in five days last year from investors, family, staff and angel supporters.
The reception MiAI Law has received in the market means a shift in priorities for Laina. “In the beginning, I built MiAI Law to help me with my own work because I wanted a perfect memory,” she says. “Over time, MiAI Law has evolved into a legal reasoning and verification system. It now takes up most of my time.
“I still practise, but selectively,” Laina adds. “I focus on advisory work, which aligns closely with what we are building. In practice, I use MiAI Law to accelerate and augment my own legal work. It allows me to get on top of new areas of law in a fraction of the time, sometimes in a quarter of the time, and to unearth lines of argument that I might not otherwise have considered. I then verify those lines and apply my own judgement to determine which ones I will run.
“Our customers are reporting that it augments them, reduces their anxiety, and allows them to take on about 25 per cent more work”, she enthuses.
Clear boundaries
“AI can support judgment, but it must never obscure it,” Laina warns. “MiAI Law is designed to strengthen professional reasoning, not replace it. Many current legal AI tools rely on post-trained language models that draw on a combination of model memory and secondary materials to construct answers.
“We took a different approach,” Laina adds. “Starting from the building blocks of law itself – cases and legislation. We extract the controlling rules, anchor them to the precise paragraphs where the court states them, and build the analysis from that foundation of legal rules.”
Every proposition in the MiAI Law research reports is hyperlinked back to the primary source with pinpoint references. During answer generation, the language model is tightly constrained to generate a reasoned report from those inputs. “Instead of asking a model to recall or infer the law, we require it to reason from the law,” Laina explains. “The stepwise reasoning queries and all retrieved cases are also revealed to the user. This means that all MiAI Law reports produce analysis that is structured, precise, and capable of being verified against the underlying authority
More than just a research tool
Beyond research, MiAI Law introduces an audit capability. Features such as contract review, LawCheck and AppealCheck are designed to stress-test legal reasoning and identify gaps or appellate vulnerabilities before advice is delivered or an appeal is filed.
“MiAI Law is, at its core, a risk management tool,” Laina says. “Legal work rarely fails because the law is unavailable. It fails when something material is missed – a controlling rule, a limiting authority, or a defect in how an argument is structured.”
So, Laina is building a system that reduces that risk in a practical way. The Checkmate features operate across different parts of legal work. For pleadings, the system checks that the material facts required for each cause of action have actually been pleaded. For cases, it identifies potential errors of law and prepares a draft notice of appeal for the lawyer to consider. And, for legal documents more generally, it verifies that legal propositions are accurate, and that cited authorities genuinely exist.
“Separately, under our contract review capability, the system surfaces legal risks, audits contracts for ambiguities, and repugnant clauses,” Laina says. “The thrust of our suite of contract review features is to deliver a robust assessment of whether the agreement is likely to withstand challenge in court.”
Widespread acclaim
“MiAI Law is the way of the future and it is great to see an Australian at the forefront”, Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG, former High Court Justice, said of the platform. And Danny Feller SC, Senior Counsel at 2 Selborne Chambers, said, “If ever there was a ‘killer app’ for lawyers that delivers, MiAI Law would have to be it. It transcends traditional legal research as it doesn’t just find information; it synthesises it. And it has cut my preliminary research time substantially and uncovered lines of argument I might have otherwise missed. It is, without exaggeration, AI for lawyers on steroids, and will become an essential part of a lawyer’s toolkit.”
Other feedback form established members of the legal profession includes: “MiAI is set to revolutionise legal AI research”; “MiAI Law has changed how I work through a problem”; and “Using MiAI Law feels like having a second brain or counsel sitting next to me.”
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