In an era when trust, transparency, and speed are non-negotiable in the legal world, Laina Chan, CEO and Co-Founder of MiAI Law, is making “audit-ready” the new gold standard.
A decorated barrister with over two decades of experience in high-stakes commercial disputes, Chan has built a career on precision and strategy. Today, she is applying that same discipline to legal technology, creating a platform that doesn’t just deliver answers but delivers them with a verifiable chain of reasoning lawyers can defend in any boardroom or courtroom.
MiAI Law’s audit-first approach addresses one of the biggest concerns around AI: the black box problem. Traditional large language models generate responses without showing their work. MiAI Law does the opposite, revealing each retrieval step, listing all cases found, identifying the subset relied upon, and linking every legal proposition directly to its source. The result is reports that are not only fast but fully transparent, with what Chan calls “bull’s- eye” pinpoint referencing.
The impact goes beyond compliance. By giving lawyers a clear, defensible trail of how an answer was formed, MiAI Law strengthens client confidence and equips counsel to stand behind their recommendations. “AI won’t replace lawyers,” Chan says. “It frees them to focus on strategy, interpretation, and judgment.”
But Chan is quick to point out that verification remains essential. In her own litigation work, she uses MiAI Law to confirm strategy, then goes back to the underlying cases to extract
additional insights the model may not surface. It’s a workflow she believes should be taught in law schools: generating an AI report, then dissecting it to identify gaps, flaws, or overlooked authorities.
Real-world conversations with senior lawyers have only reinforced the need for this. Chan has seen clients run legal advice through generic AI tools like ChatGPT, only to return marked-up suggestions that are often flawed or irrelevant. It’s a risky shortcut, she warns, because AI can mimic the form of legal reasoning without truly understanding it.
MiAI Law changes that equation. Whether in contract review or pre-litigation analysis, its audit trail allows lawyers to start from a position of strength, unearthing critical clauses, surfacing potential ambiguities, and providing a foundation for better-informed decisions. As one King’s Counsel in London noted after seeing the platform’s output, the tool’s ability to identify risks in a fraction of the time could reshape how legal teams approach complex reviews.
For Chan, the goal isn’t to automate expertise out of the profession, but to elevate it. “It’s like having a world-class researcher who doesn’t get tired, makes fewer mistakes, and can find that needle in the haystack so you can focus on what to do with it,” she says.
With MiAI Law, Laina Chan is building more than a product. She’s building a future where legal research is transparent, strategic, and verifiable from the first click to the final argument.
