Laina Chan is a barrister with extensive experience in legal research and a founder of MiAI, a legal research and management platform. During this session, Chan discussed how artificial intelligence is transforming legal research whilst maintaining the rigorous standards that underpin good lawyering. Drawing on her background working with appellate judges in Australia and her subsequent career in litigation, Chan explored why legal research remains fundamental to legal practice, how AI tools can enhance rather than replace human expertise, and the significant barriers to entry in scaling legal tech solutions across jurisdictions.
Overview
Legal research sits at the heart of every legal matter, whether providing client advice, preparing litigation arguments, or ensuring contracts can withstand legal challenge. Chan emphasised that research is not an end in itself but rather a critical step in solving client problems. The conversation revealed a disconnect in current market offerings: many transactional lawyers rely on precedent playbooks without understanding the underlying case law that supports their standard clauses, potentially leaving contracts vulnerable to challenge.
The discussion explored how AI can address this gap by rapidly extracting key legal principles, tracing their development through case law, and providing precise citations. However, Chan stressed that successful implementation requires mature legal markets with comprehensive digital access to legislation and case law. The session also highlighted an interesting tension: whilst some law firms use AI to enable partners to conduct research faster, others deliberately restrict junior lawyers’ access to ensure they develop critical thinking skills through traditional research methods.
Key Takeaways
- Legal research is foundational to all legal work, providing advice, litigation strategy, and contract validation, not a standalone activity
- Current AI legal research tools must extract the “ratio decidendi” (legal principle) from cases with pinpoint citations to be truly useful and verifiable
- Transactional lawyers often lack awareness of case law challenging their standard contract clauses; AI can bridge this gap by grounding contracts in law rather than tradition
- Scaling legal tech across jurisdictions requires significant investment in data licensing, copyright clearance, and jurisdictional customisation
- Law firms are divided on AI adoption: some use it to free partners for research, others deliberately maintain junior lawyer involvement to preserve skill development
- Academic researchers using legal AI platforms have reported substantial productivity gains in writing and publishing legal analysis
