Most legal AI has been built overseas, then pointed at Australia.

The pitch is global scale. But for many Aussie practitioners, that means a tool built for another market, retrofitted to local law. Features arrive late. The tone isn’t quite right. The citations don’t go deep enough. And the price tag is hard to justify.

Habeas is doing it differently.

Will McCartney founded Habeas in Sydney in 2023 with a straightforward observation: the tools being built for Australian lawyers weren’t really being built with them.

The first wave of legal AI was about coverage. Get something secure, deployed across the team, that broadly worked. Box ticked. But the tools deployed here were mostly built somewhere else first.

Global platforms are built globally. Australian rollouts are often a line item on a product roadmap, with features developed in one market arriving here 12 months later. A tool optimised for somewhere else will feel like it, even if the underlying model is strong.

That’s why the Habeas team spent years doing the unglamorous work — sitting with Aussie lawyers and feeding their feedback directly into the product.

“It’s not just the law they consult on. It’s how they think about the law, the traditional frameworks, how a document should be drafted. All those things compound,” he says.

The result is a platform built on Australian case law, legislation and legal documents, semantically enriched so the system understands the relationships between authorities.

Legal search is the obvious starting point. Natural-language queries answered with genuine analysis rather than a list of links. Think AustLII, but conversational, with every answer cited to the subparagraph. Practitioners can trace exactly which judgment was pulled and which judge wrote it.

The product goes further.

Habeas drafts documents against Australian conventions, correctly styled, exportable to Word, with a precedent bank behind them.

For complex litigation it reads, analyses and interrogates the documents a practitioner uploads — whether pleadings, contracts or a brief — surfacing what matters in material that would take hours to work through by hand. It also takes voice dictation, so a barrister can think out loud and have it captured in usable form.

Each piece is designed for how Australian legal work is actually done, rather than adapted from a template built elsewhere.

The effect is less a faster search engine and more a single workspace where a matter can move from first question to finished document.

The results are showing up at the top end of the profession.

At the bar, the use case is concrete. A silk preparing for a substantial commercial matter can upload pleadings, surface paragraphs exposed to a strike-out application, and stress-test arguments against the other side’s submissions. Barristers from top floors on Phillip St, as well as the Vic Bar, are adopting Habeas into daily workflows.

In-house, the appeal is productivity and judgment. A general counsel at a Series B startup had been spending five figures monthly on external counsel and had tried the platforms everyone recommended before settling on Habeas.

What she values is a thought partner that can take on a complex range of strategic research questions. She describes it as a “law firm in your pocket” — something that engages with the actual complexity of the matter in front of her.

Neither user wanted a tool that simply returned results faster. They wanted one that understood the work.

The globals have the capital and the brand. Habeas has something that’s harder to replicate: a product built from the ground up for this market.

Sponsored by Habeas