#The problem
A barrister receives a brief. It is 1,500 pages. They have 48 hours. They work alone. There is no support staff to summarise it, no paralegal to pull the key documents, no junior to draft the standard orders. Everything that doesn’t require counsel’s judgment — digesting the bundle, finding a specific document during a hearing, drafting correspondence in the correct form — falls on the barrister personally.
That’s where Silk starts.
#What it does
Silk is an AI workflow platform built specifically for barristers, starting with the Victorian Bar. Each workflow is designed to drop in for an individual practitioner with no technical setup.
Brief triage. A 1,500-page bundle becomes a structured one-page summary: parties, issues, key dates, outstanding items, instructions. What would take two to three hours takes minutes.
Document search. Real-time search within the brief during a hearing. Find the document, the paragraph, the date — without stopping to page through the bundle.
Citation synthesis. Plain-language research query to synthesised authorities with AGLC4 citations, citation treatment checked. Research time cut substantially.
Draft orders and correspondence. Describe what’s needed; receive a document in the correct court format with markup for review, then a clean final version.
Attendance notes and fee notes. Dictate post-hearing; receive a structured attendance note. Time entries to a formatted fee note ready to send to the instructing solicitor.
#Why it exists
The volume problem in family law — 800 to 1,500-page briefs, multiple hearings, contested consent orders — is where Silk was designed to prove itself. Family law trial barristers spend roughly half their time in court and a third on brief review. Those are the highest-pain, most time-intensive workflows. Silk is designed to address them directly.
The name derives from “taking silk” — the appointment of King’s Counsel or Senior Counsel at the Bar.
#Status
Phase 0 (research and discovery) complete. Building Phase 1. Not yet publicly available.