Student Program — Australian law students
Twelve months of Barrister AI Reader, free, for law students who help make the platform better.
Sign in with your Australian university email address — anything ending .edu.au or .edu — and take up the offer. You will be asked for a current student ID within a week of joining.
Twelve months of Barrister AI ReaderNo costNo credit cardCredits earned by contributing
What you are getting
New decisions from courts and tribunals across Australia, analysed into structured headnotes — the holding, the orders, the reasoning. The case your lecturer assigned this morning, already briefed by the time the seminar starts.
Consolidated Acts and instruments, section by section, linked to the authorities that consider each provision. When a problem question turns on one subsection, the section and the case law that gives it meaning sit on the same page.
Ask a legal question and the answer is built from primary law, cited to the paragraph. Click a pinpoint and the judgment opens at the passage relied on — exactly the habit your case notes are supposed to teach you.
Save the cases, provisions and passages a topic turns on, organised by subject — so revision starts from the passages you marked all semester, not from a blank page.
The exchange
Law students at Australian universities get a full year of Barrister AI Reader at no cost, in exchange for helping us make the law on this platform more accurate. That means obtaining requested judgments we have tried and failed to obtain — you give us the PDF and we check it — flagging content that is genuinely wrong, rating the answers you read, and telling us where our research went off the rails.
It is a straightforward exchange. You are already deep in Australian case law and legislation — for seminars, case notes, problem questions, exams. When you notice something wrong, telling us takes seconds and makes the platform better for everyone who uses it after you.
If no suitable requests are available, that does not count as a contribution shortfall for the month. Earlier uploads keep the rules offered when they were received. We do not ask you to log your time. The deal is one accepted requested judgment a month. Reserve a judgment from our approved request list, then supply its complete, readable PDF; no analysis is required. Ratings and flags count too, in small amounts, once we have verified them. A person reads what you send each month to confirm it is genuine.
The deal, in four lines
Full access to the Reader plan for a year — the case feed, headnotes, legislation, the notebook and grounded research tools — at no cost.
Like Reader, the student tier does not include a monthly research credit. Credits are how research memoranda are paid for — and on the student tier, contributing is what earns them: the more you contribute, the more research credits you earn, up to A$25 a month.
The year runs from the date you are enrolled, and ends twelve months later. Reaching the end of the term is not the same thing as being moved off the program early — see the review section.
Your contributions are reviewed by the team that builds the platform. That is real legal-editorial work on live Australian law — the kind of thing worth talking about in a clerkship interview.
Contributions
Reserve an approved request after reading its credit offer, then supply the complete PDF. We have tried and failed to obtain these judgments through our available sources. We verify its own citation, every page, and that it is still missing from our library. The request states the credit offered before you start. One accepted requested judgment a month secures your free access for its upload month. No analysis is required.
Catch the genuine errors on the platform: a mis-stated holding, a missing subsection, a citation that does not support the proposition it is attached to.
Suggest improvements to how legislation is presented and searched. Show us where there are equivalent Acts in another jurisdiction — the corresponding section of another State’s Act, or the Commonwealth analogue — and tell us why you think they line up. Point out where important explanatory documents, such as explanatory memoranda or second reading speeches, are missing, and where our historic versions of legislation are incomplete or wrong. We check it, and a suggestion that turns out to be right is worth a great deal.
When research misses the point, say what you asked, what you expected, and what you got instead. Software defects are welcome here too.
Thumbs up or down on answers, headnotes and summaries as you use them. Ratings count for the least.
The one rule
A requested judgment counts toward access once we accept it as complete, readable and still missing from our library. No headnote check is required. Other contributions count after verification. Credit rewards are separate: the request shows its credit offer before you start, and the judgment must be verified and accepted before we apply the credit at monthly review, not when it is sent.
The standard
The headnote says the appeal was allowed, but the orders at [45] dismissed it — the third sentence of the headnote is the wrong way round.
The consolidated text of s 12 is missing subsection (3), which the 2024 amending Act inserted.
The memo cited the right case for the wrong proposition: it relied on [22], which is obiter, when the ratio is at [38]–[41].
Here is the complete PDF of the judgment I reserved, including its cover and final orders.
I asked for the test for an extension of time and got the test for leave to appeal — here is the question I asked.
What we cannot act on
None of these will get you into trouble — a thumbs-down is still useful signal. They just will not, on their own, be read as genuine engagement, and they are not what earns credits.
Review & rewards
We read your contributions each month to confirm genuine engagement — the program asks for one accepted requested judgment a month. Upload the PDF; no analysis is required. A judgment counts once we confirm it is readable, genuine and missing from our library; ratings and flags count too, in small amounts — twenty verified ratings make a month — once we have verified them; a Chat thumbs-down that points to a clear mistake is verified by an automatic check, and everything else by a person. There is no automated downgrade: a human looks at the work, which means your flag lands on a real desk, not in a void. The one thing that happens on a deadline rather than a judgement is the student ID: if we never receive one, the enrolment ends.
If a month falls short, you get one warning by email telling you what we are looking for. Only after that would we move you off the student tier.
Acceptance into the program, continuation in it, whether a contribution counts, and what other contributions earn are decided by us. We honour the stated credit offer for each accepted requested judgment. We may end any student’s place in the program at our discretion, at any time. We may change or end the program, and we will tell enrolled students if we do.
Because the student tier carries no credits of its own, the credits you earn are what let you run a full research memorandum. That is the point of them.
Questions
No. You never enter a card to join the program or to stay in it. If you ever want to buy extra research credits on top of the ones you earn, you can — but it is never required.
Yes. It is the same Reader plan practitioners pay for — the case feed, headnotes, legislation, notebook and grounded research tools — not a cut-down student edition.
Australian universities. You verify with your university email address — .edu.au or .edu, and CQUniversity’s cqumail.com and UQ’s uq.net.au work too, so Monash and the other universities on unusual domains are covered. If you are enrolled in law at an Australian university, you qualify; the student ID you send us is what confirms it.
We read contributions monthly, and we are not counting hours — the deal is one accepted requested judgment a month, with no analysis required, and verified ratings and flags top it up. If a month falls short you get one warning by email before anything changes — a busy stretch is not how you lose the year.
We tell you before it does, and you choose: move to a paid plan, or drop to the free tier. Nothing renews behind your back.
Choose a case from our approved requests and supply its complete PDF. One accepted requested judgment a month is the deal; no analysis or headnote check is required. The rest happens while you read — a thumbs-up costs nothing and a precise flag takes seconds, and both count a little once verified.
The rules
Your twelve months are stamped when you are enrolled in the program, not when you created your Barrister AI account.
This page sits alongside our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which continue to apply. Questions about the program go to our contact page.
Student Program