Australian start-up Mary Technology has raised $7m to solve the misuse of artificial intelligence that is plaguing the legal profession.
The funding, led by OIF Ventures, will fuel the company’s expansion into the lucrative US market, where it plans to open a San Francisco office.
Mary Technology’s core product, a fact management system, is designed to be a safeguard against what chief executive Daniel Lord-Doyle calls hazardous over-reliance on general-purpose artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT in court rooms.
Mary – named after one of its founder’s aunts who is an “efficient” lawyer – already counts Shine Lawyers, Maurice Blackburn, and Hall & Wilcox, among its customers.
“Lawyers can’t rely on a ChatGPT-style response,” Mr Lord-Doyle said.
That’s because general-purpose AI gives authoritative-sounding answers that are often based on statistical probability rather than verifiable, hard evidence, making them a poor fit for a profession with near-zero fault tolerance, he said.
“If you ask that system like, ‘how did you come up with that answer?’ it will tell you a really wonderful answer but it’s just another answer,” Mr Lord-Doyle said.
For example, US District Court judge Kevin Castel issued sanctions against two lawyers who cited fake ChatGPT-generated legal research in a personal injury case two years ago. He blasted them for wasting the court’s time. It also wasted their clients’ time, and the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds it was untimely.
Several firms have sought to solve this technology-fuelled problem with – more technology. Media and information conglomerate Thomson Reuters launched its CoCounsel Core platform in Australia in 2024.
It can absorb thousands of documents and answer a lawyer’s questions via simple verbal prompts within seconds. Opposing counsel no longer will be able to bury documents during a case’s discovery phase.
Mary aims to eliminate “fact chaos” – the manual, decade-old process of fact extraction – and counter what Mr Lord-Doyle called “artificial thinking”, which was the unquestioning acceptance of an external, unverifiable AI output.
Mary’s fact management system aimed to change how legal AI processes information by treating every relevant detail as a “first-class citizen” fact that was permanently linked back to its source document.
Mr Lord-Doyle said this was crucial for solving the legal profession’s verification crisis. He said that unlike general-purpose AI that attempts to retrieve information based on a best guess, Mary’s system extracted and organised verified facts like a human lawyer would, but at “machine speed”.
“We say, within this document of 10 pages, there’s actually 50 facts. And based on what you’ve told us the matter is about, here’s the 10 most important facts from that that you really should understand. Here’s everything that we think about it, but please don’t trust us. Click on it and view it straight away, right next to the fact,” Mr Lord-Doyle said.
He said users could verify and edit those “facts”, which become the “building blocks for Mary to mirror a human process”.
“Mary gives you an answer that when you ask it ‘how did you come up with this answer?’ It actually understands: ‘I use these 325 facts. 250 of them have been verified by a human’.”
The platform introduces what the company calls “productive friction,” a process designed to ensure that human judgment is applied at the factual level – effectively “gatekeeping” where unverified AI could lead to errors.
The $7m capital raising will allow Mary Technology to further invest in its proprietary algorithms and accelerate its global ambitions. The company, founded in 2023 by Mr Lord-Doyle, Rowan McNamee, Harry Raworth and Luke Abagi, has already achieved 10 times annual recurring revenue in 2025, although Mr Lord-Doyle did not disclose the exact figures or the company’s valuation.
Oliver Darwin of OIF Ventures said: “From our first meeting, it was clear that fact chaos is a genuine hair-on-fire problem that’s gone unsolved for far too long – and the Mary Technology team has both the depth of understanding and the execution chops to finally crack it.
“They’ve delivered on every promise and are showing strong growth. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with the team as they take on the global market.”
Jared LynchTechnology Editor