Built for how you practice: LEAP Practice Areas, a year in review

Most days in practice end the same way. Court finishes, or the settlement goes through, or the client leaves, and there’s always work waiting to be finished. The file note, the letter, the next date, the calculation you will do by hand because the spreadsheet is on someone else's machine. Most of what the Practice Area teams built this year is aimed at that part of the day. 

In May we officially introduced you to those teams. Six months on, there is a fair bit to update you on. The team have launched thirteen new apps, just between July and October. Matter types have been rebuilt in NSW and Victoria. Criminal lawyers in NSW now have a free case law resource they did not have before. And the Employment Law team, which was a few weeks old when we last wrote, now has product in your hands. 

Here’s what each Practice Area team has delivered since May, in the words of the practising lawyers who lead them. They also share what they held back, what shaped their thinking, and what they want to build next. 

Quick note: Everything described here is included in your LEAP subscription.  

Where the Practice Areas started 

A conveyancer's week looks nothing like a criminal lawyer's. One is settlements and adjustments, the other is mentions, bail, and sentence. General software for “lawyers” might cover fundamentals, but it won’t understand the nuance needed for different areas of practice. We have been building legal software for more than 30 years, and we understand that the best parts were built by people who had done the work. 

A little over two years ago we doubled down on that insight and created our first practice area team. We put a practising family lawyer in charge of a team of legal researchers, a product owner, designers, and developers, and asked them to work on family law and nothing else. It went well enough that we did it six more times. Property, Personal Injury, Estates, Criminal Law, Litigation, and Employment Law each have their own team now, led by Angela Johnston, Aaron Sahin, Mahwish Malik, Bridget Barnett, Kate Himmelhoch, and Carly Stebbing, with Jenna Downy still leading Family Law.

The approach for all of them has been the same from the start: get the foundations right before anything goes on top. That means matter types, forms, critical dates, and the database underneath, state by state. It took the better part of a year, and almost none of it is visible from the outside, which is how it should be.

Where we were in May 

In May, most of the teams were describing their first releases. Personal Injury had Compensate. Estates had just released the Assets & Liabilities app for NSW. Criminal Law had rebuilt the NSW matter types, brought the Judicial Information Research System into LEAP, and had Court Outcomes in beta. Property had the Settlement Adjustments app and a growing set of prompts. Litigation was still on foundations. Employment had existed for a few weeks and was spending time with clients and working to address the building blocks. Family Law, two years ahead of everyone, had Parenting Calendar +, Balance Sheet +, Ruffle, and The Family Law Forum. 

So, what’s changed since then? 

How far the teams have come 

It’s been a busy second half to the year. Between July and October, the teams released 13 apps. A list would not tell you much, so here is what has changed for you, by practice area. 

Criminal law 

In a busy criminal practice, that can mean finishing the day better prepared for tomorrow, with more time to rest. – Bridget Barnett, Head of LEAP Criminal Law

Court Outcomes came out of beta in July and is now available in every criminal and traffic matter type. You add your court notes to the matter, the AI turns them into a recorded outcome, the client letter is generated from that outcome, and the Outlook appointment for the next listing is created, all in one quick workflow. Bridget Barnett, who leads the team, picks it as the release clients are most impressed with once they see it in action, drawing on her own experience in criminal practice to explain why. “I still remember leaving court after half a dozen appearances in one day and feeling overwhelmed by the admin waiting for me. Each matter needed a file note, a client letter and the next court date diarised. I also had clients to call and a hearing to prepare for the following day.” With Court Outcomes, she says, "much of that post-court admin could have been taken care of in minutes, leaving more time to prepare for the following day and, importantly, to switch off and recharge.” 

The team also launched Case Notes in July. It is a plain-English blog of NSW criminal law decisions, updated every day. Each post summarises the decision and links straight back to the full judgment on NSW Caselaw. It is a free resource, and is open to every criminal lawyer in the state, LEAP client or not.

The Criminal Charges table is available in all NSW criminal matter types, and was built to make recording, reviewing and researching charges easier for criminal lawyers. Charge details are available across LEAP forms and correspondence, reducing repeated data entry throughout a matter. Victorian criminal matter types and forms were also updated in recent months. 

Personal injury 

That isn’t arithmetic anymore, this is how you’d advise a client on whether they should realistically take an offer. – Aaron Sahin, Head of LEAP Personal Injury

Since May, the Personal Injury team has released Chronology, published its prompt library, and added a costs tool for work injury matters. Chronology went to clients in September. It builds a chronology from the records on the matter and links every entry to the page and paragraph it came from, so checking a date no longer means going back through the brief. You review and accept the entries, and what you have accepted is kept when the chronology is regenerated. The Schedule 7 Costs Estimator for NSW work injury damages matters followed on 1 October.

Chronology is a standout release for Aaron, “People see Compensate as a calculator, and they judge it on whether it gets the multiplier right. It does, but that’s the least interesting thing about it. The real change in v2.0 was scenarios. You can build the claim in multiple ways: the best case, worst case and the most likely outcome. Then you can put those versions next to each other. That isn’t arithmetic anymore, this is how you’d advise a client on whether they should realistically take an offer.” Most firms, he says, still open it the week before a settlement conference. “The firms getting the most from it open it at file review, when the answer still changes how they run the matter.”

Estates 

The apps provide a structured place to capture the relevant information, rather than having that information scattered across different documents, spreadsheets and correspondence. – Mahwish (Mav) Malik, Head of LEAP Estates

This has been a year of innovation and development. EstatePlanner launched in August for NSW estate planning matters. It uses AI to draw on the documents in the matter and produce first drafts of Enduring Powers of Attorney, Appointments of Enduring Guardian, and revocations of both, which you then refine and save back to the matter. Victoria got its Probate Application Fee Calculator in July and EstateAdmin arrived on 27 October for NSW probate and letters of administration matters, drafting the initial letters to asset holders with content that changes depending on what is in the estate.

Mahwish Malik, who leads the team, describes what it and the Assets & Liabilities app are for. “The apps provide a structured place to capture the relevant information, rather than having that information scattered across different documents, spreadsheets and correspondence. The dashboard allows you to keep track of the progress of asset collection and you can generate a summary of the information to assist with completing the NSW Supreme Court's online probate application. When it’s time to call in the assets, EstateAdmin prefills institution release forms from the LEAP tables, reducing manual data entry.” And when a beneficiary cannot be found, LEAP Estates' partnership with Finders International means the search can be requested from inside the matter. 

Her own measure of the year is a number. Since her team released the Estate Planning Package matter type in January, NSW firms have opened more than 14,000 matters on it. 

Property 

With fewer clicks, less data entry and a more intuitive workflow, the new Settlement Adjustment Solution app delivers real time savings that add up across busy conveyancing practices. – Angela Johnston, Head of LEAP Property

The second half of the year went on leases and loans. LeaseCalcs was released nationally in August, the Amortisation Calculator in October, and the Lease Register at the end of October, which gives your firm one view of every lease it holds across all matters. Rhylee Hanrahan from the Property team remembers using multiple solutions in practice “CPI rent adjustments meant hunting down the right figures in convoluted spreadsheets buried on the ABS website, then applying them to the formula by hand. Now I can use LeaseCalcs to do that for me with just entering a small amount of known information.” 

Angela Johnston's pick for the underestimated release is from earlier in the year. The new Settlement Adjustment Solution app went out in March, the third of its kind, and a fair question at the time was why another was needed. A recent time and motion study has shown just how much of a difference it can make, with an indicative time saving of around 45% compared with the previous solution.

Litigation 

For me, that’s the direction AI in litigation should take: less time spent on the administrative groundwork, with lawyers retaining control over the work that requires their expertise. – Kate Himmelhoch, Head of LEAP Litigation

LitigationMap went live in September. Open it in any litigation matter and it maps the parties with their pleadings and evidence underneath, so you can see what has been dated, filed, and served without opening the folder. The part Kate Himmelhoch picks out is the Court Timetable, because she remembers doing it the other way. “Managing court orders was a constant administrative headache, particularly when working across multiple courts and jurisdictions, each with different ways of communicating the orders made: by email, through a court portal, in consent orders that were agreed at the final minute.” Now you point the app at the email or document, Matter AI pulls out the orders, and you check each one before it goes into LEAP and Outlook. 

Employment law 

How frustrating it was to turn away underpayment work because I could not do it in a way that was commercially viable for me and the client. FairPay by LEAP has changed that. – Carly Stebbing, Head of LEAP Employment Law

Employment law now has a dedicated team and a product to go with it. Unfair Dismissal and General Protections matter types are live, with the 21-day Fair Work Commission lodgement window calculated when you open the matter, and more matter types, forms, precedents, and expert guidance followed in October. So did two apps. FairPay uses the Fair Work Commission's pay database to do award, classification, and minimum rate work, with a traceable reference for every figure. Employment News keeps you across what has changed. Carly Stebbing built FairPay for a frustration she knew well. “How frustrating it was to turn away underpayment work because I could not do it in a way that was commercially viable for me and the client. FairPay by LEAP has changed that.” 

Family law 

It’s one of those developments where I think back to my own practice and genuinely wish I’d had access to something like it. – Jenna Downy, Head of LEAP Family Law

The Order Library is complete. More than 1,600 parenting, property, procedural, and other orders, drafted by the Honourable Garry Watts AM with the team's in-house family lawyers, searchable and insertable from inside LEAP, with room for your own. Jenna Downy picks it as the release clients underestimate, partly because of where it sits relative to AI. “While AI is becoming increasingly capable in many areas, drafting precise, legally sound orders is still something it doesn't do particularly well.” The team has also built its own Chronology for family law, for a document that, as Jenna puts it, “is not something you prepare once and forget about.” The Family Law Forum has passed 620 members. 

Across every practice area 

Two things landed this year that are not tied to any one practice area, and a third kept growing underneath all of them. 

The first is LEAP CRM, which officially launched on 6 October after a quiet period in the hands of early firms. It tracks every enquiry from first contact through to retained matter, so the phone call you took on Tuesday and the web form that came in on Friday night sit in one place with a next step against each, and you can see what is converting and what is not. It is built to be running in hours rather than months, and when an enquiry becomes a matter it carries straight into LEAP. 

The second is Pathways, LEAP's AI matter guidance, which rolled out through July and August. It reads the matter and suggests what to do next. Because the Practice Area teams own the matter types it works from, the suggestions reflect how your area of law operates. 

The third is the AI underneath the apps. Matter AI and LawY are now doing the first draft, the summary, and the research question inside the matter across every practice area, and most of the apps above lean on them: Court Outcomes drafting the client letter, LitigationMap pulling orders out of correspondence, EstatePlanner drafting from the documents on file. The AI Paralegal, which does billable work and records it against the costs agreement, is with family law firms now and is the model for what Property is building for conveyancing. The prompt library keeps growing too, and it works the same way for everyone: each team writes prompts for its own area, and every prompt is available to every client, whatever you practise. Personal Injury published its set as a standalone library in September, and Property and Family Law each ran a prompts webinar. 

The courts moved on AI this year as well, and the teams have kept you across it. The Family Law team wrote up the Federal Circuit and Family Court's practice direction in May, the Employment team covered the Federal Court's GenAI practice note and the Fair Work Commission's guidance, and the Litigation team ran a webinar on the Victorian courts' practice notes. The takeaways from all are similar and align to how LEAP’s AI is designed to be used: closed tools, contextually aware output, and the lawyer accountable for what goes out. 

LEAP’s AI was recently recognised as a finalist in the Australian AI Awards for the Legal Services Provider category. 

Some wins, and some things we learned 

The lesson was that delivering a genuinely useful end-to-end workflow is more valuable than releasing individual features simply to meet a deadline. – Kate Himmelhoch, Head of LEAP Litigation

The wins are easy enough to name. A slew of app launches. Case Notes, open to criminal lawyers who have never been LEAP clients. Thirteen thousand estate planning matters on a rebuilt matter type. LitigationMap in every litigation matter in the country. An Employment Law team that did not exist in March shipping in October. 

The things we learned are probably just as useful to you. 

The first is that deciding not to ship something is as much a part of the job as shipping it. 

Kate Himmelhoch's team had a Debt Recovery app ready for beta with a scope that stopped at the letter of demand. They held it. “We recognised that clients would get significantly more value from a workflow that extended through to drafting a Statement of Claim and integrating with InfoTrack. The lesson was that delivering a genuinely useful end-to-end workflow is more valuable than releasing individual features simply to meet a deadline.” Aaron Sahin's team made a similar call with its PIAWE calculator, which worked and was being used, and rebuilt it as a workers compensation toolkit. “Workers compensation is more than just PIAWE. It incorporates a plethora of calculations which require a lot of time for little reward, particularly in the early stages of the claim.” A lawyer makes those calls differently from a product team. That is a large part of why the Practice Areas exist. 

The second is that the law moves while you are building, which you know better than we do.

“The NSW psychological injury reforms took effect on 1 July. The CTP review is still running,” Aaron says. “A tool that was right in March can be wrong in July.” It is why Compensate was built for NSW common law first and is only now moving to other schemes, and why the Estates team works one state at a time. If yours is not there yet, that is the reason, and it is on the list. 

The third is trust, which more than one lead raised without being asked.

A lawyer can forgive a clunky screen and some slowness here and there, but they won’t forgive one wrong number, and they’ll remember it for years. – Aaron Sahin, Head of LEAP Personal Injury

You are accountable for every figure that leaves your office. “A lawyer can forgive a clunky screen and some slowness here and there,” Aaron says, “but they won't forgive one wrong number, and they'll remember it for years.” PI practitioners, in his experience, are “pragmatic and sceptical in about equal measure,” trained to find the inconsistency in the other side's evidence and inclined to turn that same instinct on the software. “A tool that can't show its working doesn't usually make its way out the door to the other side.” Kate sees the same thing among litigators, and thinks the question has shifted this year. “The conversation has moved from whether lawyers should use AI to where it can be used safely and effectively. The legal analysis, strategy and judgment remain firmly with the lawyer.” It is why Chronology links every entry to its source, why Court Outcomes flags anything Matter AI could not complete with confidence, and why nothing in LitigationMap is saved until you accept it. 

The last one is how important the leads' lived experience is.

Each of them has a matter they still think about, and most of this year's releases trace back to one. For Aaron it is a CTP claim with three accidents in two years, overlapping injuries, several treaters, and several insurers each funding a different part of the claim. “The Chronology application would have surfaced it on day one, with a link straight to the page and what accident it was from.” For Mahwish it is a large estate administration with information arriving from everywhere at once. “So much time is spent on the administrative side of things in these types of matters, dealing with information coming from different sources, identifying assets and liabilities, corresponding with asset holders and ensuring everything is recorded accurately.” For Kate it is interest on a debt with multiple invoices, partial payments, and years of changing rates, which the Debt Recovery app will do for you. “It's a relatively simple improvement, but one that would have saved me hours in practice.” For Jenna it is the chronology she rebuilt at every stage of a family law matter. “It's one of those developments where I think back to my own practice and genuinely wish I'd had access to something like it.” That is the point of having lawyers decide what gets built. 

What's on the cards for 2027 

We asked each lead what they want to build next. Four of them want to join up what they already have, so you stop carrying information between tools by hand. 

Aaron Sahin: “Right now, Chronology tells you what happened and Compensate tells you what it's worth, and the lawyer carries the facts between them by hand. I'd like to see Chronology feed to Compensate: past care, time off work, treatment dates, all flowing through with the source still attached.” Compensate will also move beyond NSW. Jenna Downy's products already pass financial information into a balance sheet and from there into a set of orders. Next is affidavits drafted from those orders, and beyond that she wants to “move away from lawyers having to manually navigate between different products, repeatedly enter information or perform multiple steps to achieve something that should be relatively straightforward.” Bridget Barnett wants more of the post-court tasks connected to Court Outcomes, “so lawyers spend less time re-entering information and more time preparing their matters and advising clients.” Kate Himmelhoch's Debt Recovery app will run from letter of demand through judgment and enforcement, across NSW, Victoria, and Queensland, by September 2027, with Brief Builder for briefs to counsel and court books to follow. 

The tools should give lawyers more time to think and not a reason to think less. – Aaron Sahin, Head of LEAP Personal Injury

The other three are building further out. Carly Stebbing's FairPay will take roster data and calculate wages owed, review payroll for shortfalls, and handle remediation, on the way to what she calls “a complete wage compliance solution.” Angela Johnston's is the AI Paralegal for Conveyancing, which takes on the administrative work once a contract goes unconditional. She puts it at up to 3.5 hours a matter, and her argument for it is capacity rather than speed: time back for senior staff, more matters or more states without extra administrative staff, and busy periods absorbed without recruiting for them. Mahwish Malik's is reach: the estates offering extended across Australia, matter types reviewed for every remaining state, and the Estates Edit seminars continuing. 

Aaron also offered a prediction, with a caution attached. “In 2027 the gap between firms that use AI and firms that don't will show up in the work itself. You'll be able to tell from the quality of a brief to counsel, or from how quickly an offer gets a properly reasoned response.” The firms he expects to gain most are small plaintiff practices in regional towns, which “can now run a matter with the depth that used to need a floor of paralegals.” The caution: “A chronology produced in minutes is only worth something if someone has checked it. The tools should give lawyers more time to think and not a reason to think less.” 

Final thoughts 

Six months ago, the Practice Area teams were still getting off the ground. Now each of them has several releases behind them, with the next ones already planned. The aim has not moved since the first Family Law team was formed: software that fits your practice, rather than the other way around. 

This year, tools that fit your practice. Next year, tools that fit each other. 

You deserve a platform that reflects the reality of practice so all of this is included in your LEAP subscription. To see what is available for your practice area, visit the LEAP Practice Areas page or get in touch with our team. 

How did Sian from Good Law go from sole practice to a thriving team of 19?

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