Top 10 AI Tools Every Legal Professional in Australia Should Know in 2025

Australian legal professionals should pay attention: generative AI isn't coming - it's already being trialled by half of ANZ lawyers and in-house teams, and 94% expect it to reshape routine work, from research to drafting (LexisNexis generative AI survey).

At the same time, national reports show Australian firms leading global GenAI adoption and rethinking billing and resourcing as automation shifts “grunt” tasks - even as firms still hire more graduates (Thomson Reuters Australia State of the Legal Market 2025 report, AFR coverage).

The payoff is real - vendors and pilots point to huge time savings (LexisNexis estimates ~11 hours a week) - but so are risks: accuracy, traceability and ethics top practitioner concerns.

Practical steps matter: learning prompt craft, validation workflows, and secure tooling turns threat into advantage; the AI Essentials for Work bootcamp teaches exactly those workplace skills and prompt techniques for legal teams (AI Essentials for Work syllabus).

Attribute	Information
Bootcamp	AI Essentials for Work
Length	15 Weeks
Courses	AI at Work: Foundations; Writing AI Prompts; Job Based Practical AI Skills
Cost	$3,582 (early bird) / $3,942
Syllabus	AI Essentials for Work syllabus
Register	Register for AI Essentials for Work

“To a degree, the future must remain unknown. Artificial intelligence and its effect on courts, the profession and the law will change the landscape of life in ways we cannot predict.”

Selection began with a simple premise: Australian lawyers must choose tools that meet local court expectations and regulator guidance, not just flashy marketing.

Tools were therefore evaluated against criteria pulled from recent Australian sources - judicial warnings about fabricated citations and the “fake cases” episodes that led to public admonitions, the Supreme Court of Victoria's practical guidelines on responsible use, and government procurement and governance guidance - assessing accuracy and verifiability, confidentiality and data‑governance, jurisdictional coverage for Australian law, and vendor commitments to testing, human oversight and contractual protections.

Shortlisted vendors were checked for features that matter in Australian practice (private/legal LLM options, citation verification, DMS integration and clear disclosure workflows), scorecards were weighted to penalise hallucination risk and weak data protections, and pilots and training plans were required before adoption so firms don't trade time saved today for costly rework tomorrow.

For full context see the judiciary's practical warnings on AI and the Supreme Court of Victoria's responsible‑use guidance and Australia's Model Clauses for AI procurement.

Evaluation criterion	Research basis
Accuracy & verification	Judicial guidance on AI from English and Australian courts
Confidentiality & data governance	Victorian Legal Services Board statement on the use of AI in legal practice / DTA Model Clauses
Governance, testing & oversight	Analysis of voluntary guardrails and AI risk management in Australia
Jurisdictional fit & tooling for Australian law	NexLaw / Australian legal research commentary

Large language models (such as ChatGPT) are not capable of conducting reliable legal research.

NexLaw's NeXa positions itself as a true litigation copilot for Australian firms, launched locally to turn marathon trial prep into a sprint by securely ingesting case files for jurisdictional analysis and rapid case‑law synthesis; Australian coverage and courtroom-focused features mean NeXa can surface precedents, flag strengths and weaknesses, and produce a courtroom-ready brief in minutes rather than days (vendor reports even cite dramatic reductions from “100 hours to 3 minutes”) - see Security Brief coverage of NexLaw's Australian rollout and The Legal Wire's review of the Trial Copilot for practical examples.

Built around a conversational assistant and an AI Trial Co‑Pilot, NexLaw bundles accelerated research, streamlined document review, predictive analytics and ContractAI drafting tools into one platform, backed by a strategic NVIDIA partnership to scale secure, privacy‑first processing for local practice needs.

For Australian litigators balancing heavy dockets and duty of care, NeXa promises real time evidence integration and judge‑specific insights that can turn prep time into courtroom strategy, though firms should follow the same validation and governance steps recommended earlier in this guide.

Attribute	Detail
Principal products	NeXa (conversational AI), AI Trial Co‑Pilot, ContractAI
Local launch	Australia (Sydney‑based presence)
Strategic partner	NVIDIA (Inception program)
Capital update	Seeking USD $5 million (reported)

“We are thrilled to bring NexLaw's transformative technology to Australia's Legal market. With our NeXa platform and AI Trial Co‑Pilot, we are on a mission to help law firms streamline their entire litigation process, allowing them to focus on what truly matters - delivering value to their clients and winning cases.”

For Australian firms weighing legal AI, CoCounsel sits squarely in the Thomson Reuters ecosystem - a generative research and drafting assistant that combines agentic “Deep Research” with Westlaw and Practical Law authority, Microsoft Word drafting tools, and document‑analysis workflows designed for real legal work; see the Thomson Reuters CoCounsel product overview for details on integrations and capabilities (Thomson Reuters CoCounsel product overview).

Practical uses reported by libraries and practitioners - from fast transcript summarisation and deposition outlines to multi‑step research memos and contract redlines - map directly to everyday Australian needs, especially when firms demand verifiable citations, KeyCite status checks and DMS/Word integration for court‑ready drafting (law library and industry coverage discuss real‑world examples and limitations: KCBA News Bar Bulletin write-up on CoCounsel, Legal Dive article on CoCounsel and industry implications).

The practical “so what?”: when validated and used with the governance steps recommended earlier, CoCounsel can turn first‑pass research and drafting from hours into minutes - but reliability still depends on verification and jurisdictional checks.

“A task that would previously have taken an hour was completed in five minutes or less.”

Luminance brings a Legal‑Grade™ proprietary LLM and a Word‑integrated workflow that Australian firms can use to turn contract bottlenecks into predictable outputs: first‑pass automated review, clause‑level summaries, redlines and an Ask Lumi chatbot for instant Q&A, plus new AI‑Powered Checklists that focus attention on the clauses that matter (Luminance overview page).

Trained on millions of verified documents and built by Cambridge‑trained mathematicians, the platform promises enterprise security (ISO27001), broad integrations with Microsoft 365 and VDRs, and measurable ROI in published case studies - examples include dramatic time‑savings in NDA and diligence workflows and reported reductions in review time of 80–90% for some clients - making it a pragmatic option for Australian corporate and in‑house teams that must balance speed, compliance and human oversight; for a practical feature spotlight see Luminance's post on the new AI‑Powered Checklists (Luminance AI-Powered Checklists blog post), which helps new reviewers follow institutional standards without interrupting counsel.

Attribute	Detail
Core capability	End‑to‑end contract processing (review, negotiation, repo, redraft)
LLM	Proprietary Legal Pre‑Trained Transformer (LPT) trained on legally verified docs
Integrations	MS Word & Outlook, Salesforce, VDRs
Security	ISO27001, enterprise controls
Notable ROI	Clients report 80%+ time savings; Hitachi NDA to signature in minutes (reported)

“With Luminance, we have everything we need in one place.”

Harvey has emerged as a firm‑trained, domain‑specific generative AI platform built for litigation, regulatory and in‑house work, and Australian firms are already putting it through rigorous pilots: King & Wood Mallesons and Gilbert + Tobin ran multi‑hundred‑lawyer experiments before broader rollouts, surfacing practical use cases from document review to strategy synthesis.

The platform's Knowledge Vault and secure project workspaces let firms upload templates and precedents so models learn a firm's playbook, while enterprise‑grade security and a “zero training on your data” stance aim to protect privilege; learn more on the Harvey AI platform (Harvey AI platform overview).

Recent alliances - including a LexisNexis partnership to bring citation‑backed legal content into Harvey - promise more grounded, workflow‑driven outputs (LexisNexis–Harvey strategic alliance announcement).

The practical payoff for Australian litigators and compliance teams is clear: faster first passes on large reviews and research, but only when paired with governance, validation and training so speed doesn't sacrifice accuracy.

“Our decision to partner with Harvey is the latest step in our digital transformation journey. Over the past 18 months, our people across Australia and Singapore have been experimenting with a number of generative AI products and learning about the responsible use of AI, its risks, opportunities and practical legal applications. The launch of Harvey presents a new opportunity to embed these skills and knowledge and take our AI capabilities to the next level. We are excited about AI's potential to enable us to deliver faster, smarter and higher value solutions to our clients, and we are looking forward to engaging with our clients and our people on how it will shape the future.”

Evisort positions itself as an AI‑native contract intelligence platform - now available through Workday - that turns messy contract repositories into searchable, actionable data for in‑house and commercial legal teams; its platform combines clause extraction, auto‑tagging, dashboards and generative drafting so legal and commercial stakeholders can ask natural‑language questions across HR, finance and procurement contracts and get links to source documents in seconds (see Evisort's product overview).

Trained on millions of contracts (vendor materials and reviews cite an 11M+ contract training base and 1B+ data points), Evisort's CLM is pitched at mid‑market and enterprise buyers who need connected contract data, automated renewals and executive‑level reporting; Workday's announcement highlights faster approvals and cross‑functional visibility via Workday Contract Intelligence and Workday CLM. The practical “so what?” is tangible: customers have used the tech to scan tens of thousands of agreements for variations - NetApp's project found dozens of clause variants across 24,000 contracts - converting buried obligations into business levers.

Prospective Australian adopters should weigh enterprise strengths (deep analytics, Workday integration) against reported weaknesses in OCR on legacy paper and a North America–centric support model, and confirm pricing and implementation scope with demos and pilots (see Evisort's explainer on how contract analysis works).

Attribute	Detail (from research)
Owner / Availability	Evisort AI now available through Workday (Workday press release)
AI foundation	Proprietary contract LLM; trained on 11M+ contracts / 1B+ data points (vendor/review)
Best for	Mid‑size & enterprise legal, procurement, finance teams
Core capabilities	Extraction, auto‑tagging, dashboards, generative drafting, connected contract data
Known limitations	OCR issues with legacy contracts; implementation/onboarding can be resource‑intensive; custom pricing

“Workday has leapfrogged the CLM space with next-generation contract AI. It's the fastest to deploy, most field-tested, most secure solution in the market.”

Kira by Litera is a staple for high-volume due diligence work that Australian corporate teams should know about: lawyer‑trained extraction that recognises 1,400+ clause types across 40+ substantive areas, out‑of‑the‑box clause libraries and Rapid Clause Analysis to find identical drafting at scale, plus Smart Summaries (including multi‑document summaries and an OpenAI‑linked option) that jump‑start diligence reports so reviewers begin from a coherent first draft rather than a blank page - practical when an M&A review needs clear takeaways, not months of manual charting (Kira contract review product overview - Litera, Litera blog: Year of Kira contract review and analysis).

The platform's configurable fields, multilingual OCR and familiar, trackable review workflows make it a pragmatic choice for Australian firms and in‑house teams that must balance speed, security and auditability during tight transaction timetables; evaluate it in a pilot to confirm accuracy for local contracts and defined‑term linkages before wide rollout.

Attribute	Detail
Core capability	Automated clause extraction & contract analysis
Clause coverage	1,400+ clause types
Substantive areas	40+ areas
Notable features	Smart Summaries, Multi‑Document Smart Summaries, Rapid Clause Analysis
Adoption	Thousands of firms (platform used globally)

“Kira enables our lawyers to become faster and more accurate doing the due diligence.”

Diligen is a pragmatic, machine‑learning contract reviewer worth a look for Australian firms that need faster, auditable first passes on large sets of agreements: the platform automatically surfaces key provisions, produces Word or Excel summaries, and lets teams colour‑code clauses and jump from summary to source with a single click - a workflow reviewers praise for cutting review time by roughly half in early case studies (Diligen contract review platform overview).

Designed to scale (the vendor advertises workflows for anything from dozens to hundreds of thousands of contracts) and to be trained quickly on firm‑specific concepts, Diligen pairs hundreds of pre‑trained clause models with simple self‑training tools, role‑based review panels and APIs for integration with practice systems; see the Legaltech Hub profile for feature and deployment notes (Legaltechnology Hub Diligen vendor profile).

For firms using practice management platforms, the Clio integration can speed matter intake into automated review pipelines (Clio app listing for Diligen integration); as with all tools, pilot testing on Australian‑law contracts and a clear validation workflow remain essential before rollout.

Attribute	Detail (from research)
Founded / HQ	2015 / Canada
Core capability	Machine‑learning contract review & extraction
Clause models	150+ / hundreds of pre‑trained clause models
Outputs	Contract summaries (Word, Excel); project reports
Integrations	Clio, Box, NetDocuments; API available
Scalability	Advertised for 50 to 500,000+ contracts
Regions served	North America (used globally)

Ross Intelligence pioneered plain‑English legal search that lets lawyers ask questions the way they would phrase a question to a colleague, using NLP to parse jurisdiction and date filters and a three‑stage pipeline (Understanding, Retrieval, Ranking) that surfaces the most relevant passages rather than relying on brittle keyword hits - see the ROSS Intelligence explainer on natural‑language legal search ROSS Intelligence explainer on natural‑language legal search.

The platform's machine‑learning features (trained on over one million lawyer‑crafted Q&A examples) and word‑embedding approach can speed first‑pass research and help match facts and motions to precedent, a useful capability for Australian teams wanting conversational search in day‑to‑day work.

But that same history also carries a hard lesson: recent litigation over training data culminated in the Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence rulings about copyright and fair use, which Australian firms should factor into procurement and governance decisions when buying or piloting legal‑search AI - review the Finnegan analysis of the Thomson Reuters v.

ROSS Intelligence decision Finnegan analysis of the Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence decision.

In short: ROSS's NLP model shows what plain‑English legal search can do, but pairing speed with robust validation, licensed training data and IP risk checks is essential for safe adoption in Australia.

“Ross's AI is not generative AI (AI that writes new content itself).”

Everlaw is a cloud‑native ediscovery and litigation platform that will matter to Australian firms weighing speed, defensibility and secure AI in 2025: its high‑speed ingestion and processing engine handles up to 900,000 documents per hour, supports drag‑and‑drop uploads, native spreadsheet redactions and instant A/V transcription, while built‑in features like concept clustering (which the vendor likens to “Google Earth” for documents), Storybuilder and the Everlaw AI Assistant turn sprawling datasets into searchable narratives and defensible summaries - so a million‑page review stops feeling like a needle‑in‑a‑haystack problem and starts feeling like a mapped journey.

The platform's predictive‑coding (TAR 2.0), batch automation and transparent traceability of AI outputs speak directly to Australian concerns about verification and auditability; evaluate via the Everlaw ediscovery platform and the Everlaw Ediscovery Buyer's Guide & Checklist to test local workflows and data governance before wide rollout (Everlaw ediscovery platform overview, Everlaw Ediscovery Buyer's Guide and Checklist).

Attribute	Detail
Processing speed	Up to 900,000 documents per hour
AI & analytics	Everlaw AI Assistant, clustering, TAR 2.0 predictive coding, Storybuilder
Automation	Auto‑coding, batch redactions, native spreadsheet redaction, A/V transcription
Security & compliance	SOC II Type II, FedRAMP authorization, ISO 27001/27017; HIPAA/GDPR audits

“Customer support is excellent. You get to talk to a real human that is familiar with the software and the usage from your perspective.”

Spellbook has evolved from a handy Word add‑in into a full AI drafting suite that Australian transactional teams should watch closely: with GPT‑5 now live in the product, in‑Word drafting and redlining work where lawyers already live, and the new Library feature (Smart Clause Drafting) that learns from a firm's own precedents so a buried clause can be summoned and auto‑fitted to a new deal in seconds - no tab‑hopping required.

Designed around Review, Draft, Ask, Benchmarks and the new Associate multi‑document workflows, Spellbook promises faster first passes, clearer risk flags and clause reuse that preserves institutional style; firms can test it with a 7‑day trial and must still layer in the same validation and governance checks recommended earlier in this guide to manage accuracy and confidentiality.

Attribute	Detail
Core features	Review, Draft, Ask, Benchmarks, Associate (multi‑doc)
Integration	Microsoft Word add‑in (in‑Word drafting and redlines)
Model	GPT‑5 (now live)
Library / Precedents	Smart Clause Drafting: index OneDrive/Dropbox or upload files
Trial	7‑day free trial
Customers / scale	3,600+ legal teams (vendor materials)
Founded / funding	Founded 2021; seed funding reported (vendor sources)

Choosing and rolling out AI in Australian legal practice is less about chasing the shiniest feature and more about running disciplined pilots that prove reliability, protect client confidentiality and embed human oversight: start with clear success metrics - relevance, accuracy, completeness, timeliness, validity and lack of duplication - as recommended in the government's Australian Government Pilot AI assurance framework guidance (Step 5), require staged human sign‑offs at critical checkpoints, and map each pilot to business outcomes so adoption isn't a technology experiment but a measured, billable advantage.

Pair those pilots with a formal responsible‑AI playbook that sets roles, red‑teaming tests and communication plans to rebuild public trust (see practical governance steps in Corrs Responsible AI governance guidance for Australian organisations).

Upskilling is the final piece: structured training in prompt craft, validation and secure tool use turns early wins into repeatable practice - the AI Essentials for Work bootcamp teaches precisely those workplace skills and prompt techniques for legal teams (AI Essentials for Work syllabus), so pilots scale without sacrificing ethics or defensibility.

Attribute	Information
Bootcamp	AI Essentials for Work
Length	15 Weeks
Courses	AI at Work: Foundations; Writing AI Prompts; Job Based Practical AI Skills
Cost	$3,582 (early bird) / $3,942
Syllabus	AI Essentials for Work syllabus
Register	Register for AI Essentials for Work