As of 1 July, AML/CTF obligations have become an operational reality for thousands of legal practices across Australia. I was pleased to have spoken at The Industry Collective Speaks, which brought together four corporate Tranche 2 professions, and discussed AML/CTF issues that require careful navigation by solicitors.
Yesterday, for the first time, four of Australia’s Tranche 2 professions shared a single forum. Lawyers, conveyancers, accountants and real estate agents, along with AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas and peak industry bodies, sat in the same room and had the conversation that has never happened before: not within a single sector, not at arm’s length through guidance documents, but openly, together, with the hard questions on the table.
When the NSW Supreme Court rescinded a $6.2 million Bronte property sale in May 2026 and ordered a $310,000 deposit refunded over undisclosed planning information, it served as a timely reminder across the industry. While the specific detail belongs to that case, the underlying issue belongs to every practitioner: incomplete information at the point of exchange, and the costly consequences that follow.
A seasoned legal technology executive who has shaped property and conveyancing markets across two continents, Dennis Barnhart brings his expertise and a clear-eyed view of where the industry is headed to InfoTrack’s Canadian business.
When Treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down the 2026-27 Federal Budget on 12 May, the headline numbers dominated the news cycle. But for legal practitioners and conveyancers already preparing for the first day of Tranche 2 AML/CTF obligations, one line item deserved closer attention than it received.
Every year, the final weeks of June expose the same fault lines in property law firms: matters that sat dormant for months suddenly require immediate exchange, trust account reconciliations compete for the same senior practitioners managing last-minute contract executions, and cyber criminals time their fraud attempts to coincide with the chaos.
Most conversations about AI in legal technology focus on the front-end experience. We discuss what the chat window looks like, how natural the language feels, and whether the experience is intuitive enough to drive adoption. While these are reasonable questions, they miss the deeper context.
