UNSW Law & Justice student recognised for pioneering algorithmic law
Juris Doctor student Mona Chiha has been named the 2026 Lawyers Weekly Australian Law Awards Innovator of the Year.
Published on the 14 August 2026
Mona Chiha has been recognised for using AI to help improve access to justice. Photo credit: Camera Creations
The prestigious awards recognise Australia’s best-performing legal professionals. Judges assessed nominees using both quantitative and qualitative criteria, recognising growth, diversity, leadership, innovation and contribution to Australia's legal sector.
Mona Chiha said she was surprised by the win. “I honestly wasn’t expecting to win because I never win these things.”
Putting in the work
Ms Chiha is completing a Juris Doctor (JD) at UNSW to support her academic research at UTS in algorithmic law.
“While I was putting together my research proposal, I thought I didn’t want to miss anything in my research. To do that, I wanted to go to the best law school in Australia and that happens to be UNSW Law & Justice,” she said.
“A lot of the research that I was reviewing came from academics at UNSW, and that's what helped me choose UNSW as the place where I wanted to do my JD.”
Building what’s next
Ms Chiha’s JD studies complement her work as the founder of legal deep-tech startup JurisTechne, where she is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to simplify litigation assessment and improve insights into case outcomes.
“We’ve structured a whole bunch of unstructured legal datasets and given it some meaning, given it features, we’ve given it relationships in a deterministic way, so there's no hallucination, there's no generative AI and there's no risk to that hallucination or to that privacy leakage,” Ms Chiha said.
Ms Chiha developed the idea after years of working as a litigation funder. “I couldn’t find any technology to help me make the right type of investment decisions. I couldn’t use generative AI. I went down a rabbit hole of large language models and saw it was absolute rubbish. I come from a tech and finance background, and I thought about how I could replace that.”
Ms Chiha said the goal is to standardise access to justice. “I'm doing my research for commercialisation and adoption purposes, so courts, lawyers, and self-represented litigants can get access to this knowledge base and have a way to navigate through information.”
UNSW Law & Justice Dean, Professor Andrew Lynch, congratulated Ms Chiha on her success so far.
“Winning Innovator of the Year is an outstanding achievement. It reflects the originality of Mona's work in algorithmic law and its potential to reshape how Australia's legal profession uses AI. We are thrilled to have her as part of our student community.”