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General Counsel, especially those operating as the sole legal resource or within small in-house teams, are expected to advise across an extraordinary breadth of issues. Privacy law, consumer protections, contractual obligations, employment matters, regulatory compliance: the list grows every quarter, and the margin for error shrinks with it.
The traditional safety net has been external counsel. But that safety net comes with a steep price tag, and the feedback loop is slow. A question that feels urgent on Monday arrives back as a memo on Thursday, accompanied by an invoice that makes the CFO wince. Meanwhile, the GC is already fielding the next five issues.
This is the gap Habeas was built to fill. Not as a replacement for professional judgment or specialist external advice, but as a powerful first-line intelligence layer that gives GCs the depth and speed they need to operate with confidence across a wide surface area.
"It feels like having a law firm in your pocket. Not something you blindly bet the house on, but a powerful first-line legal intelligence tool." Lisa, General Counsel at Series A Startup
Under pressure, solo GCs or small in-house teams cannot afford to miss crucial precedents. A single overlooked authority can mean the difference between sound advice and an exposure that surfaces months later.
Habeas' Search Engine scans over 300,000 Australian cases and pieces of legislation in seconds, pinpoint-citing specific risks across areas like privacy, consumer law, and contractual obligations. These outputs are grounded in real authorities: Habeas' RAG architecture restricts retrieval to a closed dataset of legitimate Australian legal sources, meaning results are verifiable and traceable, never hallucinated.
For GCs working in heavily regulated sectors like insurance, financial services, or healthcare, this precision matters enormously. The nuance of Australian jurisdiction-specific law is something generic AI tools consistently miss. Habeas was purpose-built for this layer of depth, and that specificity translates directly into confidence when forming legal views.
"The Australian-law focus and the depth of nuance in the answers is a major differentiator. It materially changes my confidence and speed when forming legal views."
External firms charge substantially more for equivalent diligence. With Habeas, that initial sweep of the legal landscape, the one that tells you whether you are on solid ground or need to dig deeper, happens in minutes rather than days.
Compliance is one of the areas where lean legal teams feel the squeeze most acutely. Verifying alignment across regulatory frameworks, auditing standard-form agreements, and ensuring internal policies reflect the current state of the law: this is painstaking, detail-heavy work that traditionally demands either dedicated headcount or significant external spend.
Habeas Document Stores let GCs upload policies, contracts, and compliance materials for conversational querying. Need to check whether your privacy policy aligns with the latest APP guidelines? Want to identify gaps across a suite of vendor agreements? Habeas surfaces precise matches from your documents, alongside public authorities if that is your retrieval preference.
This collapses what used to be weeks of manual trawling into focused, shorter working sessions. A sole practitioner can now handle document volumes that would typically require a dedicated compliance team, without compromising thoroughness or security.
Beyond document analysis, Habeas' custom Research Assistants allow GCs to build their own specialised agents tailored to their recurring workflows. One GC described the experience of configuring her own assistants as "having a virtual legal team," each one tuned to a specific domain or task type, ready to support her the moment a question comes in.
This is particularly powerful for GCs who work across multiple practice areas daily. Rather than context-switching and starting from scratch with each new query, the assistants retain the framing and focus that the GC has configured, turning Habeas into a tool that adapts to the way you actually work.
One of the most significant implications of tools like Habeas is how they reshape the relationship between in-house teams and external law firms.
Historically, external counsel served as the GC's thought partner: the first call when a novel issue emerged, the go-to for a second opinion on a developing risk. That dynamic is changing. As access to high-quality legal intelligence improves, reliance on external counsel for routine and even moderately complex work drops significantly.
"External counsel used to be the thought partner. Now Habeas and AI fill that role. Over time, I expect legal spend on external counsel to be a fraction of what it is today, reserved mainly for highly specialised or strategic input."
This does not mean external firms become irrelevant. Complex litigation, specialist regulatory advice, and high-stakes transactions still require deep expertise and the accountability that comes with formal engagement. But the volume of queries that currently flow to external counsel, often at premium hourly rates for work that is more research than strategy, is set to contract meaningfully.
For GCs, this is a direct budget recapture. Spend that once went to routine external queries can be redirected toward growth priorities, or reserved for the genuinely specialist engagements where external counsel adds irreplaceable value.
Habeas costs a fraction of what equivalent external diligence runs. But the ROI extends well beyond simple cost comparison.
The compounding effect comes from immediate productivity gains. Complex queries that once consumed hours of external turnaround and accompanying fees can now be resolved in minutes. That time recaptured is not abstract: it translates directly into capacity for strategic advisory, proactive risk identification, and genuine business partnership.
GCs who adopt Habeas report tangible returns from their first week. The tool pays for itself quickly, and the gap between what it costs and what it delivers widens with every use.
Beyond research, Habeas provides marked uplifts in both workload capacity and the quality of initial drafting.
The Research Assistants feature synthesises search results and relevant documents into structured outputs: template memos, issue checklists, risk frameworks. Foundational research processes that used to take a full morning can now be completed in minutes, giving GCs a solid starting point that they can then refine with their professional judgment.
The effect is that the labour-intensive groundwork gets handled by Habeas, freeing GCs to focus on the high-stakes judgment calls that require human insight: the strategic read of a board paper, the nuanced conversation with a regulator, the call on whether to escalate or absorb a risk.
This efficiency compounds over time. Every hour saved on routine legal work is an hour available for the advisory and partnership functions that make in-house counsel genuinely valuable to the business.
A recurring theme in feedback from GCs using Habeas is that the quality of output is noticeably different from generic AI tools. This is not simply about accuracy (though that matters enormously). It is about the calibre of reasoning and the relevance of the analysis to the Australian legal context.
"Habeas is more business-like and better at critical thinking than other tools. There's a sense of rapport and partnership in using a bespoke legal tool, rather than a generic AI."
GCs who have tested competing platforms, including Harvey, Legora, and ChatGPT, consistently note that Habeas delivers more precise and more useful outputs, particularly for work that demands jurisdiction-specific depth. The Australian-law focus is a genuine differentiator, not a marketing label. It changes the quality of the intelligence you receive, and that quality change flows through to the speed and confidence with which you can form legal views and advise the business.
Habeas is built with the recognition that generic AI tools are improving rapidly, and that larger players will inevitably expand their footprint in legal knowledge. The specialist, jurisdiction-focused layer still matters and will continue to matter, but the bar for what "specialist" means rises every year.
The roadmap for Habeas is focused on deepening context awareness: building a tool that increasingly understands how individual GCs work, proactively supports their thinking, and evolves from a research assistant into a genuine legal intelligence partner. The goal is to become a meaningful multiplier on the GC's own expertise, handling more of the analytical scaffolding so that the human professional can operate at their highest level.
There are also important regulatory and professional-standards dimensions to this shift, including Law Society considerations around AI use in legal practice. Habeas is built with these realities in mind, prioritising transparency, verifiability, and the principle that AI should enhance professional judgment rather than obscure it.
Beyond the individual productivity case, there is a wider story about access to justice and the democratisation of legal knowledge. When high-quality legal intelligence becomes available to smaller teams and solo practitioners at a fraction of the traditional cost, the downstream effects are significant. Businesses that could never afford deep legal support now have access to tools that meaningfully close that gap.
This is part of what Habeas is building toward: a future where the quality of legal advice available to you is less dependent on the size of your legal budget and more dependent on the quality of the questions you ask.
If you want to explore how Habeas can support your practice, whether you are a solo GC, part of a lean in-house team, or advising across multiple regulated sectors, we would love to show you.
