A technology startup in Australia aiming to grow its legal artificial intelligence reasoning system officially launched Monday after what it described as successful beta tests with law firms.
Sydney-based MiAI Law emerged publicly on Monday, disclosing that it raised AU$2 million (about $1.4 million) in five days last year from investors.
The startup was founded by Laina Chan, a Sydney-based barrister who has practiced law since 2004, according to its Monday announcement. She claims to be a self-taught coder, writing over 13,000 lines of code to build the platform from the ground up.
Chan said she created the platform out of frustration with current AI legal tools that can find a case but are unable to connect it to a legal matter. She said this ability is critical for lawyers to trust the results.
“There was no AI system that embedded legal reasoning into its architecture,” Chan said in a statement. “Law is not just retrieval. It is reasoning from facts and principles. MiAI Law is built to follow that same discipline.”
MiAI Law’s platform applies AI directly to case law. Instead of just retrieving or summarizing legal information, the platform goes a step further by showing how conclusions were reached, the company said.
Lawyers in several firms, including Australia-based Aristo Lawyers, and in barristers’ chambers beta-tested the tool before the launch.
Its initial investors included family, staff and angel supporters, such as Wai Ling Chan; Mei- Shan Tan, the former general counsel for Citibank SAR Hong Kong; and David Ioannidis, the former head of fixed income trading at JP Morgan Australia.
“Laina’s ambition was to build an AI-native legal platform from first principles using foundation models as components within a broader reasoning system, not as the product itself,” Ioannidis said in a statement. “More importantly, Laina’s combined legal and technical depth as well as her refusal to compromise on the objective were key factors [for my investment].”
In addition to research, the platform has an audit capability and can do contract review, the announcement said.
With a staff of 15 employees, MiAI Law plans to expand its sales and research teams this year.
“AI can support judgment, but it must never obscure it,” Chan said. “MiAI Law is designed to strengthen professional reasoning, not replace it.”
