The Challenge

Like many for purpose organisations, Mission Australia runs on tight funding. Roughly 90% of their revenue comes from government sources, and the legal team consistently faces pressure to do more with less. Two challenges in particular stand out:

Growing regulatory burden. Compliance requirements increase every year, consuming more time and resources from a team that’s already working to full capacity.

Government funders pushing risk downstream. As funders shift more contractual risk onto service providers, the legal team has to review and negotiate contracts more carefully, with contracts cycling on short, often annual terms.

“We’re constantly being asked to do more with less. The regulatory compliance burdens are growing exponentially each year.”
— Angela Fimmano, Head of Legal for Service Delivery

Without dedicated paralegals or graduates on the team, every hour spent on contract review or document drafting is an hour not spent on higher-value strategic work or supporting frontline staff.

Why August

Mission Australia first learned about August through their longstanding pro bono relationship with Hicksons Lawyers. What set August apart from other AI tools the team had encountered was its practical, legal-specific approach. Simon, a contract specialist with 10 years at Mission Australia, described the difference:

“A lot of AI tools seem to be a solution looking for a problem. What I’ve been excited about with August is that it’s not just another chatbot. It understands the professional a little bit better. It knows what we’re looking for.”
— Simon Anderson, Contract Specialist

How Mission Australia Uses August

Contract review and analysis

The legal team’s bread and butter is contract work. Government funding cycles mean they see the same contracts year after year, but they also regularly encounter unfamiliar agreements from new funders or partner organisations. August has become the first stop for digging into those documents.

Simon described a specific scenario: a Friday afternoon call from a staff member worried about a contract termination deadline. While still on the phone, he uploaded the contract to August, asked about the notice requirements, and got a clear enough answer to reassure her before the weekend.

Definition extraction and drafting support

Emma, a lawyer on the housing growth team, used August on a 200-page contract to identify every capitalized term that lacked a definition. What would have taken a week or more of manual highlighting took about 30 seconds.

“Within 30 seconds it had given me a list of every word in the contract that hadn’t been defined. That probably saved me about a week.”
— Emma Cuelho, Senior Lawyer, Property Construction & Finance

Acting as a junior team member

At a large law firm, lawyers have access to graduates, paralegals, and support teams. At a charity like Mission Australia, those resources don’t exist. Emma put it simply: August fills the role of the team member they don’t have. It proofreads emails, flags potential issues in contract drafts, compares negotiated document versions, and adds definitions to contracts.

“It’s able to act like that assistant or team member that we don’t have here at a charity like Mission Australia.”
— Emma Cuelho

Summarising documents for frontline staff

Angela uses August to prepare talking points and plain-language summaries of contracts and consent forms for frontline workers. These staff members manage programs while also dealing with contracts and compliance paperwork. Getting them clear, accessible summaries in less time means they can spend more of their day working directly with clients.

“The fact that I can review a contract quickly with August and highlight the main obligations for our frontline staff means they can get out there and actually help people in need.”
— Angela Fimmano

Features That Stand Out

Referencing. The team values being able to see where August pulls its information from, so they can verify and form their own opinions on the output.

Practice area personalisation. August tailors its responses based on the user’s practice area. Emma noted that because August knows she works in property and finance, its suggestions arrive in the right context without her having to re-explain every time.

OCR for scanned documents. The ability to make scanned PDFs searchable has been a practical win for a team that regularly deals with older or government-issued documents.

Table formatting. Angela called out the table output format as something she particularly likes for organising contract summaries.

The Bigger Picture

Every person on Mission Australia’s legal team talked about the same thing: the reason they do this work. Angela left corporate law because the end product of her work at Mission Australia was helping people rather than making someone wealthier. Simon spent 11 years in banking before going back to university, drawn by a belief that people should be part of something bigger than themselves. Emma moved from a top Sydney firm because she wanted to put her skills toward concrete good.

“What we’re doing feels like it matters. We can see people go from absolute rock bottom to finding a home, finding a job, finding stability in their lives. The work I do is feeding into that.”
— Simon Anderson

August fits into that picture because of what it frees up. When contract review takes minutes instead of hours, the legal team can turn around advice faster. When frontline staff get accessible summaries without delay, they spend less time on paperwork and more time with clients. The math is straightforward: less time on tedious document work means more resources flowing toward the people Mission Australia exists to serve.

“Having access to tools like August allows resource-constrained organisations to really enhance the impact they’re making. It just feels like we have a bigger team than what we have.”
— Emma Cuelho

Looking Ahead

The team has only been using August for a few weeks at the time of these interviews, and they’re still finding new use cases. Angela noted that the tool has already shifted how she approaches daily tasks, always with the question in mind: could August make this faster or better?

As the technology continues to develop, Mission Australia sees the partnership with August and Hicksons as a long-term advantage for their legal team and, by extension, for the people they serve.