The NRMA's lawyers are using AI tools to save hours of research and deliver faster legal solutions
The NRMA's in-house legal team has streamlined how it works by weaving Thomson Reuters artificial intelligence tools into everyday practice. The result? Faster research, cleaner first drafts of contracts and other documents, and more time for strategic work that moves the business forward.
The NRMA operates a diverse portfolio of businesses that stretch beyond its origins in roadside assistance. These days, its reach includes holiday parks and resorts in five states, an energy division building a national network of electric vehicle charging stations, SIXT car rental, the Manly Fast Ferry, Coral Expeditions cruising, and My NRMA Rewards, a scheme that provides offers and discounts for members.
With the NRMA operating across multiple states, the 16-member in-house legal team must navigate a patchwork of regulations and legislation, on issues ranging from tenancy law to maritime compliance.
"We deal with a very broad range of legal issues both in terms of topic and jurisdiction," says the NRMA's general counsel and company secretary, Gemma Piper. "It means we have to get across the legal aspects of a lot of areas."
Usage of the team's previous research tools had dropped off due to accuracy concerns, leaving the team reliant on public resources to conduct research. The need for alternative research technology that mitigated legal risk and delivered accurate, consistent results was evident.
Piper says she also wanted a fix that was user-friendly so the in-house legal team would actually use it.
Thomson Reuters tools don't just tick the boxes for accurate research, confidentiality and reduced legal risk; they also seamlessly integrate AI to save time, reduce costs and enhance efficiencies.
Thomson Reuters has long been a fixture of the legal world, having evolved from a publisher of law reports into a global provider of digital research and AI-powered tools. Its suite of technology solutions includes Westlaw Precision for fast, accurate legal research, and Practical Law, which offers a continually updated bank of how-to guides, precedents and checklists. There's also CoCounsel, a legal AI assistant that can review, draft, summarise and compare documents in seconds. Together, the ecosystem is designed to cut drudgery, manage risk and free up lawyers to focus on higher value work.
Luke Joseph, a senior corporate lawyer at the NRMA, works across the association's parks and resorts, energy and membership businesses - a spread that requires the application of a range of laws, regulations and guidelines, depending on the sector and the state or territory. Until recently, research was fragmented.
"We did not have a central legal research tool," he says. "Everyone was using different sources and we didn't really have a consistent method of doing succinct legal research."
After a number of in-office demos, the team adopted Westlaw Precision, Practical Law and CoCounsel into its workdays, recognising that the three tools together gave it a centralised way to research, draft and review legal work with far greater speed and consistency.
"We basically fell in love with it and it was exactly what we needed," Joseph says.
For Jen Lee, the product strategy director for CoCounsel (Asia and emerging markets) at Thomson Reuters, the distinction between public AI and professional-grade platforms is critical. "Practical Law, Westlaw Precision and CoCounsel are essentially professional-grade legal AI tools that are designed to enhance productivity, accuracy and confidence levels in legal work," Lee says.
Consumer tools such as ChatGPT aren't designed for use in the legal profession. "They lack the safeguards, the accuracy, the domain-specific training that's required for professional legal work," Lee says. Thomson Reuters tools use retrieval-augmented generation to ground responses in verified legal content, with every answer supported by citations or footnotes.
"When you click on those little footnotes, it will point you to exactly which document and where it is getting that information," Lee says. "We very much believe in keeping humans in the loop with any of the AI, particularly for the legal market. It's really imperative that accuracy is on point for lawyers."
Joseph says that although the tools are useful, they don't replace legal expertise. First drafts of contracts and other documents arrive at speed, and are then shaped by lawyers and stakeholders in the business.
"We make sure it's fit for purpose and for us," Joseph says. "But that is still such a massive time saver."
Working in a national organisation with varied businesses, Joseph says AI-assisted research has made finding answers easy.
"I'm spending a lot less time trying to find what is the right legislation and what is the right section of the act," Joseph says. With Westlaw Precision, he can ask a natural language question and instantly receive a summary response that signposts the relevant statute, the precise section to reference and any relevant case law.
"That's been incredible, and CoCounsel has been a lifesaver for contracts - whether it's drafting or reviewing."
The tools save the team lots of time, Joseph says. "Everyone would save somewhere between one to two hours a day at least ... across 16 people, that's over 30 hours a day we're saving across our legal team."
Piper is also saving time on complex tasks, such as interrogating a heavily negotiated 200-page contract, and getting the results in minutes rather than hours.
Practical Law has also become a crucial upskilling tool for the team. Joseph is using its practice notes and templates to explore mergers and acquisitions. Piper says privacy best practice is an important feature, and litigation strategy and crisis management checklists give in-house lawyers structures for addressing issues that aren't black-letter law.
What's next? The NRMA lawyers would like the tools to become such an integral part of their work that using them becomes second nature.
Joseph says: "I've always said you will not be replaced by AI, but you will be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI better than you."
