Why AI Capability Alone Isn’t Enough for Australian Legal Practice

10 June, 2026

LexisNexis® CTO Greg Dickason joined Lawyers Weekly to discuss why the future of legal AI lies in integrated, governed systems and what that means for Australian firms right now.

Australian lawyers are increasingly confident that AI can help with legal work. The harder question is whether they can trust, verify, and defend what it produces.

That distinction matters.

Legal work is not simply about generating text. It involves advice, advocacy, risk assessment, and professional judgment. When an AI output sounds right but cannot be verified, the risk can be greater than doing the work manually.

As AI adoption accelerates across the profession, firms are shifting their attention from capability to accountability. The focus is no longer on just what AI can do, but whether its outputs are grounded in authority, supported by evidence, and suitable for professional use.

In a recent Lawyers Weekly LawTech Talks interview, LexisNexis Chief Technology Officer Greg Dickason put it simply:

"You need to be able to click through to citations."

"When you stand up as a legal practitioner in front of the court, they will expect that you have done verification, that you actually know what you're talking about is grounded in authoritative sources, and you can show that. And that means when you use AI, you need to be able to click through to citations, you need to be able to see how well those citations have been treated."

AI confidence is rising, but trust still depends on verification

The Australian legal profession is moving quickly. Our Australian AI Sentiment Survey reports findings from a 2025 survey of 1,037 Australian legal practitioners which found that 68.5% are using or planning to use AI, and confidence in AI rose from 75% in 2023–2024 to 90% in 2025.

This is a major shift. But higher confidence does not remove professional responsibility.

Lawyers still need to know where an answer came from. They need to understand whether cited authorities exist, and they need to check whether those authorities support the proposition being made.

This is why AI capability alone is not enough for legal practice. A tool may summarise, draft, or analyse quickly, but speed is only valuable if the work can be verified.

"Governance is a really big part of making sure that AI is not just AI, but it's legally grounded. It's authoritative AI for the legal market," states Greg.

And the profession agrees: 61.9% of Australian practitioners say they feel more comfortable using generative AI when it's grounded on legal sources. And when firms are measuring the success of their AI tools, accuracy of outputs (36.6%) sits just behind time savings (38.1%) as the leading metric - ahead of cost savings, client feedback, and revenue improvements.

This is not a profession that will accept capable-but-unverifiable.

The tasks lawyers are using AI for most - legal research (45.6%), understanding legal concepts (39.5%), case summarisation (37.1%), document analysis and review (34.4%) - are core, high-stakes legal work, where getting it wrong has real consequences.

From capable to defensible: what Australian lawyers really need from AI

The fragmentation problem is real and getting harder to ignore. In fact, many practitioners are currently moving between multiple tools.

Research here, drafting there, correspondence in a general AI, and documents in another system entirely, and with no unified audit trail and sensitive client data spread across platforms with different security standards.

Our survey shows this is exactly what they don’t want.

Integration with legal research databases ranks among the top three priorities for legal drafting tools (37.3%), and multi-user collaboration tops the list (37.8%).

These aren't feature requests either; they're signals that firms want consistency across teams and matters, they want integrated legal intelligence.

When Lawyers Weekly LawTech Talks host Jerome Doraisamy asked Greg to define what integrated legal intelligence actually means in practice, Greg's answer was straightforward:

"As a lawyer, you can go from thinking, I'm going to go over here to ask a question, and then back to over here to do my work, to actually having my work and the AI and the ability to ask the questions all integrated. So I can get a message from my client - an email - dump that into the AI, do some research with the AI, and then create almost close to a final output. Ultimately, I'm getting a Word document, a PowerPoint, maybe a complex set of those that really meet my client's needs. That's what I mean by integrated legal intelligence. It's integrated throughout your workflow.”

“It's integrated throughout your day. It's not something you go to and leave."

The AI of the future helps build the output

"The AI of the future helps me build the output... You want it trusted, you want it authoritative, you want to be able to verify the links, but you also want it to give you really high-quality outputs."

In the podcast, Greg also previewed what that future looks like in concrete terms: a new experience within Protégé™ called Work, arriving in Australia in early July.

"There's a new product called Work that's coming out … and that product is effectively very similar to the way Claude's Co-Work works, from Anthropic, but it's grounded in our content. It can pull all the skills... it gives you a lot of already predefined workflows that you can use, ones that you can import and build yourself. And it produces that final output - the Word document, the PowerPoint, etc."

It's the clearest expression yet of what Greg means by AI that helps you build the output, not just answer the question.

And it reflects where the profession is heading: 67.6% of Australian legal professionals already believe AI will disrupt the traditional billable hour, with the value of legal practice shifting toward the judgment, strategy, and trusted advice that only a qualified practitioner can provide.

Work creates the conditions for that shift. The mechanics are handled. The judgment stays with you.

What this looks like in practice

Protégé brings research, drafting, citation validation, and end-to-end workflow execution together in one private, secure, governed environment - grounded in the authoritative LexisNexis content Australian legal professionals have trusted for decades.

It's not a replacement for legal judgment. It's the environment that makes legal judgment more confident, more consistent, and more defensible.

Listen to the full conversation with Greg Dickason on Lawyers Weekly LawTech Talks here.