Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in legal practice and education, law firms and academic institutions are actively integrating advanced tools into their daily operations.
Brightstone Legal has rolled out Legora across its Australian offices, while Singapore Management University is bringing the platform into legal education through its Legal AI Scholars Program.
At the same time, Legora is expanding the foundations of legal research with comprehensive data, an AI-native citator and a full ontology of law, reflecting a broader shift towards AI-enabled research, review, drafting, and legal training.
In May, Legora opened offices in Singapore and Tokyo, establishing itself in the Asia-Pacific region after entering Sydney in 2025.
Furthermore, in a recent survey conducted by Lawyers Weekly, numerous Australian BigLaw firms are utilising Legora as their prominent AI platform, demonstrating its emergence as one of the most in-demand AI software in the legal profession.
Firm-wide AI adoption
Brightstone Legal has adopted a firm-wide approach to AI, embedding Legora across Australia, specifically in its Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra offices.
The firm tested how the platform could support work across a broad range of legal practices, with the rollout reflecting a broader shift from experimenting with AI to it becoming a normality in everyday legal workflows.
Across the firm, lawyers are using Legora for research, review, and drafting, including first-pass review across large document sets, building chronologies, comparing expert reports, testing a witness account against the firm’s own document database, and populating subpoenas and other templates in volume.
For corporate and commercial matters, practitioners are leveraging the software to draft directly from the firm’s precedent library, replicating Brightstone’s standard terminology and defined terms.
Speaking about the implementation of Legora, Brightstone Legal’s managing partner, Ethan Wang, described the benefits regarding efficiency.
“Legora allows our lawyers to work smarter, move faster, and spend more of their time on the judgement, strategy, and client relationships where lawyers create the greatest value,” Wang said.
Heather Paterson, vice president of Legora APJ, alluded to how Legora can assist smaller firms compete with BigLaw firms.
“Brightstone has the talent to compete at the highest level. Now, Legora gives its lawyers the capacity to deliver against firms many times their size,” Paterson said.
“Brightstone is the kind of firm that shows the full potential of our platform. They’re a practice that runs in two languages, across multiple jurisdictions and two legal systems. All of that work now runs through one platform.”
AI-powered legal education
As AI continues to be embedded in legal practice, law schools are starting to reconsider how aspiring lawyers will be trained before entering the profession.
By partnering with Legora, Singapore Management University (SMU) is introducing this evolution directly to students, equipping both educators and future practitioners with practical experience using software that is actively transforming contemporary practice.
Through the partnership, SMU’s law faculty will receive training on the platform, with access expanding to students and courses as SMU integrates Legora into its teaching.
On Legora, students will learn the platform through legal research, reviewing documents at scale and drafting, with Professor Lee Pey Woan, dean of SMU Yong Pung How School of Law, reaffirming the school’s value on technology.
“Technology literacy is already embedded across SMU’s programmes; this partnership deepens the integration of AI competencies specifically within legal education,” Lee said.
“Our students will practise law in a profession where AI is not optional but foundational; at the same time, we have introduced safeguards to preserve the rigorous development of foundational legal skills and to cultivate the sound and ethical judgement that will remain a distinctive human value-add to the profession.
“We are pleased to partner with Legora as we work through what this shift means for how lawyers are trained.”
Through the Legal AI Scholars Program, students are able to replicate the same platform used by leading law firms to conduct tasks, and graduates are expected to enter practice able to utilise the tools proficiently.
Schools that are partnered with the program receive guides, training videos, and use-case-specific tutorial sessions.
A new foundation for legal research
Legora’s new research foundation brings together new capabilities that combine access to comprehensive data with AI-native navigation inside the platform Legora customers already use.
Legora CEO and co-founder Max Junestrand noted that building a research platform will combine access to comprehensive data with AI-native navigation inside the platform Legora customers already use.
“We are building the operating system that agents run on inside legal organisations, and legal research is a critical part of that,” Junestrand said.
“It is also the hardest thing in legal AI.”
Melanie Brown, head of legal data at Legora, voiced frustrations from clients who struggle to access data that they already pay for in AI subscription services.
“We don’t believe our clients should have to choose between the best data and the best technology,” Brown said.
“The frustration I hear most from clients is that they cannot access the data they already pay publishers for in the AI platforms they want to work in.
“In the US, access to citable case law is constrained by the companies that own the official reports and won’t sell a digital feed.
“In Germany, the challenges are digitisation and anonymisation. But there is always a way, and we’re doing whatever it takes to bring together every data type in over 100 countries around the world.
“We are bringing all the world’s legal data into Legora.”
As such, Legora is building a full ontology of the law and an AI-native citator, through proprietary technology from its acquisitions of Qura and Wexler, compressing millions of documents into data that an agent can utilise to produce quality output.
In doing so, Legora assembled a group of attorney-editors with decades of experience in creating publishers’ navigation tools by hand, thus defining the standard, and running ongoing quality control.
“That’s what AI changes; for the first time, having someone, or something, read 60 million pages of case law is no longer prohibitive,” Brown said.
