Just a year or so ago the question among many lawyers was “do you use AI?”
Now, it’s “which AI do you use?”
Legal professionals are looking for the same solution, an LLM that they can trust.
The reputation of firms and their clients rests on the integrity of the AI they choose.
Where an AI tool draws content from the open internet, sources can’t be checked/verified and the user/legal professional is left to cross their fingers that the content is safe to rely on.
AI as good as the experts who power it
Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw Advantage Australia has changed the legal landscape by deploying a closed, trusted, AU-specific content set, comprising authoritative Australian case law, legislation, and secondary sources.
AI is only as good as the experts who power it – and our editorial team are the beating heart of the trusted content that powers Westlaw Advantage Australia.
Backed by specialist writers and editors with deep professional and publishing experience and expertise in law and tax, our team researches, analyses, writes, checks, cross-checks, classifies and edits our content following time-honoured conventions.
This means that our customers are getting the most authoritative, trusted and professionally validated content available in the market. For legal research, and especially for AI-enabled deep research, that difference matters.
Thomson Reuters has 74 in-house legal and tax editorial specialists in Australia and more than 1000 expert contributors and authors who research, analyse, write, cross-check, classify and edit content, which is then accessed by Westlaw Advantage Australia via agentic AI.
Meet some of our legal and tax experts.
A two year training program and 100 years of legal classification
Christine Eldabbagh is one of our Australian case law managers.
Christine’s team comprises more than 20 legally qualified members, with a diverse range of backgrounds, including public and private sector legal experience.
“We offer quality data to our agentic AI deep research system,” Christine says. “The Cases Team provides meaningful, human-generated relationships between cases, point of law identification and case summaries, grounded in expert legal analysis, that open-source LLMs alone cannot replicate.”
All new editors undertake a rigorous two-year training period from senior colleagues, some of who can offer almost three decades of experience. The training program includes exposure to multiple legal areas and case digest note writing.
A digest note is a short, tightly written summary of a single point of view arising from a court decision. Its purpose is to enable legal practitioners to quickly identify the relevant legal issue and how the court applied it, without having to read the full judgment. Digest notes focus on the law because the legal principle can be applied in later cases even when the facts differ.
“The daily workflow of our team involves reading and reviewing every judgment that comes from tribunals all the way to the High Court,” Christine says.
On average, the Legal Editors receive and review 72 judgments per day (18,000 per year).
“We identify points of law and classify cases according to The Australian Digest, an historical and evolving legal taxonomy, that’s existed for almost 100 years.
“This currently includes approximately 83 subject titles, from” Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples” to “Workers’ Compensation”, and thousands of sub-categories ensuring comprehensive pin-point legal coverage for legal professional research.
“Once we identify the specialist topic that will be of interest to the legal professional, we indicate the relationships between cases such as appeals and precedents and flag any significant developments or distinctions our customers need to be aware of.
“Westlaw Advantage Australia is all about everything being verifiable,” Christine says. “All those sources will be there at every step to show where they’ve been accessed.”
Deep research using authoritative and authorised court reports
Tania Zadoroznyi leads the Thomson Reuters’ in-house law reports team, working with more than 100 headnote reporters in Australia.
The agentic AI deep research in Westlaw Advantage Australia provides access to the largest collection of authorised law reports in Australia. Indeed, Thomson Reuters has published the authorised reports of the High Court of Australia, the Commonwealth Law Reports, since the court’s inception in 1903.
A headnote appears at the top of a published law report as a summary that includes the key facts of the case, the legal issues that arose, and the court’s final decision.
“These reporters – who are all practising legal professionals and subject-matter experts – work with our internal team of specialist production editors,” Tania says. “Our editorial team brings deep expertise in legal editorial, citation accuracy, case reporting and quality assurance to our reports.
“Eminent legal oversight is provided by external general editors who include senior counsel, judges and other senior leaders of the legal profession, giving us our unique depth of expertise, authority and credibility.
“Authority and trust are built into every stage of our process, with multi-stage quality checks ensuring every report is accurate, reliable and fully traceable to source.
“For our authorised law reports, there is judicial review prior to publication.
“The result is content that customers can rely on with confidence – not only for traditional legal research, but also for Westlaw’s agentic AI Deep Research capability, where authoritative, verifiable source material is critical,” Tania says.
Commissioning and curating leading content
Sophie Fotis manages one of the three Thomson Reuters commentary teams in Australia.
“Many of our editors are legally qualified, with deep legal publishing experience, ensuring legislation and case citations are checked thereby providing that critical link between human oversight and reliable AI outputs,” Sophie says.
“They commission and curate every piece of legal analysis, commentary, and annotation in the secondary sources suite, working closely with our expert writers, a broad and highly credentialled network of current and former judges, senior counsel, experienced barristers and solicitors, and leading academics and practitioners.
“This is not content generated or summarised by AI. It is human judgment, by an expert.
“Our expertise lies in identifying the right authors, managing those relationships, and ensuring content is commissioned to a standard that meets the needs of legal practitioners.
According to Sophie: “This is a specialist skill that other Legal Tech providers without a dedicated editorial function simply can’t replicate.”
The Laws of Australia: 130 specialist authors, 330+ subject areas
Legal Publishing Manager Lara Weeks and her team publish the distinguished legal encyclopedia, The Laws of Australia (TLA), which is included in Westlaw Advantage agentic ai deep research.
“Covering more than 320 ever-evolving subjects on Australian law, TLA is organised into 37 broad subject areas,” Lara says. “We recently published content on space law, military law, internet law and artificial intelligence, for example.
“Our legally qualified in-house editors are guided by our Editor-in-Chief, the former High Court justice Michael Kirby AC CMG, who oversees commissioning, defining new legal areas, and the appropriate author selection for each area,” says Lara.
TLA’s diverse external, and internal, team of authors includes more than 130 specialist authors and external consulting editors/advisers on each legal subject area editors, comprising academics, practitioners and judges. They provide authoritative, trusted and verifiable content, updating commentary as well as relevant case and statute law on a monthly basis.
“Every statement of law is sourced to primary material with pinpoints and visible currency dates,” Lara says.
Tax, it’s all about change
Westlaw Advantage agentic AI Deep Research also covers leading tax content, covering super, tax, GST and state taxes.
Principal Tax Writer Ian Murray-Jones leads a highly qualified in-house tax and accounting team at Thomson Reuters. The six tax writers have a diverse range of practical experience – from big accountancy to firms, banks, tax practice and academia.
“We’re in the business of change,” Principal Writer Ian says. “Tax regulation never stands still.
“We’ve got a daily news service and our well-regarded, weekly news service, The Weekly Tax Bulletin.
Thomson Reuters in-house tax writers also interpret and comment on developments.
“Every day we’re following what’s happening in parliament, the ATO and the courts,” Ian says. “And there are also reports from the Productivity Commission, and the Treasury delivers draft papers and reports, requesting feedback and consultation. We’re all over these news announcements from key government agencies.
“We consider an update or proposal and try to understand what it will actually mean for people in practice on the ground – and that comes from our practical experience outside the legal and tax publishing world,” Ian says.
“For example, there can be quirks in cases where they address or don’t address something. Our expert team makes sure all aspects of the case are analysed.
“You need someone with experience who can process developments and who can identify the angles and nuances that are important,” Ian concludes.
With Westlaw Advantage, you’re not only getting legal research with agentic AI that doesn’t just search, it plans, executes and reasons through complex legal problems end-to-end. You’re also getting hundreds of years of combined experience in legal and tax practice from experts that write the content that the model searches. With Westlaw Advantage, your legal team is scaled, strong and propelled by AI.
