Work Smarter, Not Harder: Top 5 AI Prompts Every Legal Professional in Australia Should Use in 2025

Australian legal practice in 2025 sits at a fork: generative AI can shave hours off research and document drafting, but courts and regulators now insist on transparency, verification and risk controls - see the Law Council of Australia AI guidance on ethical and regulatory implications Law Council of Australia AI guidance on ethical and regulatory implications, and recent judicial analyses that warn about hallucinated citations and the serious consequences of over‑reliance on AI Judicial guidance on AI hallucinations and citations.

That means prompt-writing is no longer a nice-to-have skill but a frontline control: precise prompts reduce error, reveal hallucination risk, and support the checks required by court protocols - a capability that can be taught (for example via an AI Essentials for Work course) so lawyers can use AI productively while keeping client confidentiality and professional duties front and centre.

The choice is not whether to use AI, but how to govern it safely in Australian practice.

“Evolve or die.” - Kelly Waring

Methodology focused on practical, Australia‑specific safeguards: each prompt was evaluated against three tests drawn from current Australian sources - court protocols that restrict generative AI in evidentiary material, professional guidance that demands verification and disclosure, and governance rules that require accountable officials, training and sensitivity to confidentiality.

In practice that meant favouring prompts that force explicit citation checks and human‑in‑the‑loop review (to reflect Justice Needham's warnings about hallucinations and non‑existent authorities), align with the Law Council's ethical and jurisdictional guidance, and comply with the ALRC's transparency and staff‑training expectations for any government or regulated use.

Prompts that exposed sensitive text or encouraged unverified case‑finding were discarded - a deliberate choice given how a single hallucinated case can derail a filing (see Luck v Secretary examples in judicial summaries).

The result is a shortlist of five prompts designed to boost productivity while keeping admissibility, client confidentiality and traceability front and centre for Australian legal practice.

“wisdom is of a greater order of value than intelligence.”

Spellbook prompt: instruct the AI to draft a tightly‑scoped Australian confidentiality clause that does the heavy lifting while forcing human checks - require a clear definition of “Confidential Information”, a narrowly tailored Purpose, express exclusions, obligations of the recipient, permitted disclosures to advisers, a sensible duration, return/destruction and archival exceptions, plus governing law and jurisdiction; include practical drafting notes (one‑way or mutual NDA, who signs, marking materials “Confidential”, and a register to monitor expiry and breaches).

Anchor the output to local practice by asking the model to cite Australian guidance and practical tips (for example see IP Australia NDA guidance on when to use an NDA and why marking and monitoring matter IP Australia NDA guidance - Non‑disclosure agreements), and to follow Sprintlaw's NDA agreement format guide for enforceable clauses and common pitfalls like vague scopes or unreasonable durations Sprintlaw NDA agreement format guide - drafting effective non‑disclosure agreements.

Build the prompt so the model returns (a) a ready clause, (b) a one‑page checklist for human review, and (c) red flags (consideration, restraints, retention) - because a single misplaced sentence can turn a century‑long secret like the Coca‑Cola recipe into an unenforceable promise.

"Confidential Information means all information whether of a technical, business, financial or other nature ... that is or may be disclosed or imparted by one Party to the other."

For a Clio Duo Contract Review & Risk‑Spotting prompt, ask the assistant to act as a matter‑aware reviewer inside Clio Manage: summarise each contract, extract and cite precise clause text and dates, flag ambiguous or inconsistent terms, surface missing standard protections (indemnities, limitation of liability, confidentiality), suggest priority tasks (e.g.

negotiation points, timelines), and automatically create an audit entry and a human‑in‑the‑loop checklist for verification - all while respecting Clio's permission model and data‑privacy guardrails.

Built‑in capabilities mean Duo can pull context from the matter, turn long PDFs into tight timelines, and propose billable time entries, so prompts should require source citations and an explicit final‑check step for counsel before anything is filed or sent.

For vendor details and practical examples of document summarisation and eDiscovery workflows, see Clio's Clio Duo overview and the guide on AI legal document review for best practices in verification and firm governance.

“With Clio Duo, I can get so much more done in less time and save up to 5 hours a week. It really helps me tackle writing demands creatively and efficiently, and makes prioritizing my daily tasks much easier.”

Design a CoCounsel prompt that treats summarisation and extraction as a tightly‑scoped legal task: ask for a short executive summary and a longer, issue‑by‑issue digest, a table of extracted fields (parties, dates, obligations, termination triggers), a stitched chronology or timeline, and a list of citations with links back to Westlaw/Practical Law for verification - for product details see the CoCounsel Legal overview by Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal overview (Thomson Reuters).

In Australia this prompt should also require RAG‑style grounding and an explicit human‑in‑the‑loop check (Deep Research and agentic workflows can generate multistep plans and supporting authorities, per the Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal launch analysis Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal launch analysis), plus an output column that flags low‑confidence findings and potential hallucinations.

Practical prompts leverage CoCounsel's ability to pull from uploaded documents and DMS content to build deposition questions, due‑diligence extracts, or chronologies - real users report it can surface items missed by humans even in very long collections (for example, reviewers have praised its capacity to find needles in 2,000‑page haystacks).

Always require the model to produce source‑linked excerpts and a one‑page verification checklist for counsel before relying on any draft or filing.

“The AI-generated summary of results above the list of primary law authority can be extraordinarily useful for getting an overview of the issues and pointers to primary authority, but it should never be used to advise a client, write a brief or motion for a court, or otherwise be relied on without doing further research. Use it to accelerate thorough research. Don't use it as a replacement for thorough research.”

Harvey's legal research prompt should be framed for Australian practice: ask the assistant to prioritise primary‑law retrieval from its Australian knowledge base, return fully cited excerpts, and flag low‑confidence results so a lawyer can verify before relying on anything - Harvey already aims “to make sources of primary law searchable, translatable, and citable in one unified interface” and now supports broader comparative work as it expands global data coverage (Harvey AI expands global data coverage announcement), which makes cross‑checking Australia against Singapore, EDGAR or EU materials easier in one query.

Build the prompt to force explicit source links, require a short confidence score and a one‑line reason for relevance, and include a mandatory human‑in‑the‑loop verification step because providers warn outputs may err - Australian reviews note hallucination rates that counsel must guard against and treat AI output as a research aid rather than definitive authority (Victorian Law Reform Commission AI in courts consultation paper).

Also link the prompt to vendor terms so firms capture data‑use and confidentiality rules up front (Harvey platform agreement - service and confidentiality terms).

“The Service is a research tool, and its Output is not legal advice.”

For litigation discovery and evidence analysis, craft a Diligen‑centred prompt that treats machine‑learning extractions as the starting point, not the finish line: ask the assistant to ingest uploads, extract and tag key provisions, build an issue‑by‑issue timeline, surface anomalous or high‑risk clauses, detect PII for redaction, and export source‑linked summaries and review checklists that feed straight into matter management - leverage Diligen contract analysis platform's pre‑trained clause models and self‑training capability so new concepts are learned across the dataset, and require an explicit human‑in‑the‑loop verification step and an auditable task list for counsel before any filing.

The prompt should also produce role‑based assignments and an evidence map that can scale from dozens to hundreds of contracts, matching Epiq global eDiscovery experience of ingesting and pinpointing data in hundreds of documents within minutes; tie outputs to document IDs and preserve provenance so courts or regulators can trace any assertion back to an original file.

See Diligen product details and the Epiq contract analysis announcement for practical examples of how the platform speeds contract insight and quality control.

“We are excited to partner with Epiq with the goal of providing law firms and legal departments with more efficient, fast, accurate and affordable ways to gain insight into their contracts,” stated Laura van Wyngaarden, Diligen co‑founder and COO.

Adopting prompts safely in Australian practice means treating them as governed tools, not magic shortcuts: require human‑in‑the‑loop checks, clear audit trails, disclosure where courts expect it, and privacy safeguards that track OAIC guidance on deploying commercial AI products and protecting personal information (OAIC privacy guidance for Australian AI deployments); pair that with court‑facing rules flagged by Justice Needham - because a single hallucinated case can derail a filing and judges expect practitioners to verify and disclose AI use (Justice Needham speech: AI and the Courts in 2025).

Practical next steps for firms and in‑house teams: adopt vendor due diligence and retention policies, embed mandatory verification checklists, run regular PIA and bias reviews, and upskill staff with hands‑on courses (for example, the AI Essentials for Work bootcamp teaches prompt writing, governance and human‑in‑the‑loop workflows) so teams learn to squeeze hours of drafting and review time out of AI while keeping client confidentiality and admissibility intact.

"Gen AI should not be used for editing or proofing draft judgments, and no part of a draft judgment should be submitted to a Gen AI program."