AI for Australian law firms: mask client details

AI for law firms works on a slice of the file, not the whole thing. A conveyancer wants a plain English letter explaining the Section 32 vendor statement to a first home buyer. A family lawyer is tidying the notes behind a Form 13 financial statement. A wills and estates solicitor is turning an intake call into a letter of advice, and someone is drafting a brief to counsel at six in the evening.

Each slice has the client in it: a name and date of birth, a property address, a mobile and an email, the firm’s own reference. The verification of identity file adds a passport or licence number and often a Medicare card, and since 1 July 2026 many firms also hold that file as AUSTRAC customer due diligence. A family law matter can bring a TFN.

For a principal that isn’t a question of style. Rule 9 of the Conduct Rules, on confidentiality, is yours, and so is rule 37 when someone you supervise does the pasting. Nonimo finds the client identifiers in the selected text and swaps them for placeholders on that computer, before anything is sent.

Select the paragraph, press one key, and only then paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot. In the invented purchase below, the firm’s reference, the property address, the purchaser’s name, date of birth, passport number, mobile and email reach the chat as placeholders.

What stays is what the letter needs: a 10 per cent deposit paid to the agent’s trust account on 3 October, a Section 32 to explain, a settlement to walk through. The model writes to [PERSON_1] about [ADDRESS_1], and Nonimo puts the real details back into its reply on the solicitor’s screen.

When a whole document has to go in, drop it on the Nonimo window and a redacted copy comes back next to the original, a Word file as a Word file. More on our security page.

The Law Society of NSW doesn’t rule out generative AI in a law firm. Where confidential or sensitive information is involved, it allows the tool only if that information “is not disclosed externally” through it (page 8), and its guide updated in January 2026 puts the consequence in the line quoted below.

Paying for a business version doesn’t move that line. The same guide says a solicitor’s measures are no different “whether it’s a publicly available system like ChatGPT, or a commercial proprietary system commissioned for in-house use” (page 3). For what a Microsoft licence does and doesn’t settle, read whether Copilot is safe for confidential information.

Outside NSW, the reference is the checklist the Queensland Law Society, the Law Institute of Victoria and five other societies released in February 2026 for small and mid-tier firms. It warns that vendor promises about confidentiality “need to be examined in light of the other providers involved” (page 9). Identifiers that never leave the firm’s computers need no such examination.

The Supreme Court of NSW has had a practice note on generative AI, SC Gen 23, since 3 February 2025, and the District Court and NCAT follow it. Two parts matter most for what goes into a tool. Paragraph 9A keeps suppressed material, Harman material, subpoenaed documents and anything under a statutory bar on publication out of generative AI unless the platform meets strict conditions. Paragraphs 10 to 13 keep AI out of the content of affidavits, witness statements and character references, and require them to say so.

Placeholders do not solve paragraph 9A, because that paragraph is about the material and the platform, not the names in it. They do solve the ordinary case, the letter or the brief built from the client’s own confidences, which rule 9 governs. Our guide to SC Gen 23 goes through the note paragraph by paragraph.

Victoria supplied the cautionary tale. On 19 August 2025 the Legal Services Board limited the practising certificate of the solicitor in the Dayal matter after he filed AI generated authorities with inaccurate citations. That case is about checking output. Pasting a client’s identity into the input is the other half of the risk.

Most firms begin where letters to clients are drafted every day: conveyancing, then family and estates. Download Nonimo for Mac or Windows from the top of this page, select the next paragraph and press the key.

Each computer installs the app like any other program, and staff keep using ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot as they already do.

A firm with several desks has IT roll out the browser extension by policy, which covers text in the AI tools before it’s sent; hello@nonimo.ai sets it up. The client disclosure in the societies’ checklist adapts into an AI clause for your costs agreement.