Student Program — Australian law students
Twelve months of Barrister AI Counsel, 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 CounselNo 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 Counsel at no cost, in exchange for helping us make the law on this platform more accurate. That means analysing cases we do not have — you give us the judgment, we write the headnote, you 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.
We do not ask you to log your time. The deal is two analysed cases a month. Ratings and flags count too, in small amounts, once a person has verified them. A person reads what you send each month to confirm it is genuine.
The deal, in four lines
Full access to the Counsel plan for a year — the case feed, headnotes, legislation, the notebook and grounded research tools — at no cost.
The student tier does not carry the monthly research credit that a paid Counsel subscription does. 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
If a decision is not on the platform, give us the judgment as a PDF. We read the details from it and write the headnote, and you check our headnote against the judgment — once you have, the case counts. Two a month keeps your free year.
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
An analysed case counts toward access once you check its headnote against the judgment. Other contributions count after verification. Credit rewards are separate: a contribution must be verified and accepted 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 a decision you do not have — and your headnote has the appeal allowed when the orders at [92] dismiss it.
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 two analysed cases a month. An analysed case counts once you have checked our headnote; ratings and flags count too, in small amounts — twenty verified ratings make a month — once a person has verified them. 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 how much it earns are all decided by us. 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 Counsel 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 two analysed cases a month, 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.
Analysing a case is the real work: reading our headnote against the judgment, the way you would for a case note. Two a month is the deal. 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