WHAT WE’RE EXPLORING
Practical technology for law firms
At Innessco, we spend a lot of time looking at how law firms can get more from the technology, systems and data they already have.
At ALPMA Summit + ALTACON, we’ll be demonstrating some of the projects we’ve been working on – from connecting AI directly to practice management systems, to improving management reporting and helping lawyers understand what the rapid development of AI means for legal practice.
Here are some of the things you can explore.
AT A GLANCE
What we’re sharing at ALPMA
From connecting AI directly to practice management systems to better reporting and AI literacy, these are some of the practical projects and resources we have been developing for law firms.
AI + Affinity
See how we are enabling AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude to work securely with matter information held in Affinity — including documents, correspondence, notes, tasks, financial information and other matter data.
AI Document Generation
See how AI can combine access to matter information with examples of a firm’s previous work to understand what is required and prepare documents in the firm’s preferred structure, style and language.
AI-Accelerated Custom Apps
AI is transforming custom app development, reducing work that once took days to just hours. Our Affinity KPI dashboard is one example – a purpose-built application created around the firm’s own data, reporting requirements and KPIs.
AI & Legal Practice
Explore our white paper and podcast examining what lawyers need to understand about generative AI, including capability, reliability, verification, confidentiality and professional responsibility.
AI + AFFINITY
AI working directly with your practice management system
We have developed an integration that allows AI platforms such as Claude, ChatGPT CoPilot and Harvey to work securely with the information already held in Affinity.
Instead of manually uploading individual documents, AI can access the matter context it needs – including documents, correspondence, notes, parties, tasks and financial information – subject to the user’s existing access permissions.
This allows lawyers to ask questions about a matter, prepare summaries, review correspondence, identify outstanding issues and work with the information already held by the firm.
AI DOCUMENT GENERATION
Create legal documents using your firm's own precedents and style
AI can do more than produce generic text. By using a firm’s existing example documents, we can create a Claude Skill that captures the firm’s drafting approach, preferred language, document structure and Word formatting conventions.
In this demonstration, we show how that Claude Skill is created from example documents and then demonstrate how it can be used with matter information to prepare a completed legal document.
The result is a document that reflects the firm’s own drafting approach and is produced using its Word formatting and styles – ready for a lawyer to review and finalise.
AI-ACCELERATED CUSTOM APPS
Build custom applications faster with AI
AI is changing how quickly custom software can be designed and developed. Work that once required days or weeks can increasingly be completed in hours, making purpose-built applications practical for smaller and more specialised business requirements.
Importantly, AI can accelerate much more than the coding itself. We use it throughout the development process — from defining requirements and understanding how an existing system stores and retrieves information, through to identifying how that data can be accessed and ultimately building the finished application.
In this example, we used AI-assisted development to create a purpose-designed KPI dashboard for Affinity. AI assisted with the design of the KPIs, helped determine how to capture a trace from Affinity’s Oracle database, analysed the trace and identified the SQL statements required to extract the relevant data.
We then used AI-assisted development to build the dashboard around that information. By applying AI across design, investigation, data extraction and application development, we can significantly reduce the time required to turn an idea into a working custom application.
AI & LEGAL PRACTICE
Understanding AI is becoming part of legal practice
At the Federal Court of Australia’s recent AI Symposium, one of the clearest messages was just how capable generative AI has become – and how quickly that capability is advancing.
Dr Matthew Collins AM KC described testing AI on a master’s-level law examination at Melbourne Law School. In late 2025, Claude Opus 4.5 achieved approximately 70 per cent, compared with an average student mark of 74 per cent. When he repeated the experiment in the weeks before the Symposium using newer frontier AI models, he considered every result to be “unquestionably H1 standard”, with properly presented legal citations and no discernible hallucinations.
That rapidly increasing capability makes AI literacy increasingly important. The Federal Court’s Generative AI Practice Note expects those using the technology to have “a basic understanding of its capabilities, and its limitations and risks.” Professor Kimberlee Weatherall reinforced this at the Symposium: it is no longer enough simply to know that AI can hallucinate – lawyers need some understanding of how it works, why it can fail and how those limitations should influence the way it is used.
Following the Symposium, we developed our AI and Legal Practice white paper to help lawyers build that understanding – covering AI capability, reliability, verification, confidentiality, data handling and professional responsibility. We have also produced an AI-generated podcast based on the paper for those who would prefer to explore the material in audio form.
