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Built to Make Legal Work Better

We combine deep legal expertise with proven technology to streamline documents, contracts, and workflows, so legal teams can focus on what matters

About LawHawk

Built to Make Legal Work Better

LawHawk empowers legal teams to modernise and scale with affordable technology that’s practical, proven, and tailored to how lawyers truly operate. From expert advice to workflow optimisation and automation, we help you achieve faster, more reliable outcomes, without sacrificing quality or control and without the cost, delays and frustration that you may be worried about.

As a legal operations consultancy and solution provider, we blend deep legal knowledge with cutting-edge technology to support law firms, in-house counsel, and contract managers in simplifying legal processes and minimising risk.

Our approach is collaborative, pragmatic, and results driven. Rather than just deploying tools, we partner closely with your team to design and implement solutions that integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, align with your workflows, and deliver tangible business impact.

Recognised with multiple awards, our team excels at creating high-quality, innovative solutions at unmatched speed, all delivered at commercially sensible costs that are often offset by efficiency gains and new revenue opportunities.

Leveraging an ecosystem of leading partners and technology, we offer everything from quick-win initiatives to full-scale business transformation. Our philosophy prioritises maximising the value of your current technology stack to ensure the best return on investment.

 

Built by Lawyers. Backed by Technology. Delivered for Results.

What makes LawHawk different is our ability to bridge legal, technology, and business. Our team includes experienced lawyers who understand the realities of legal practice and operations, and who use that knowledge to design smarter, faster ways of working.

We are lawyers, technologists and business people. We bring strategic thinking, the latest industry knowledge and innovation, legal design, thought leadership and a flexible, co-designed approach to every engagement. Our solutions don’t just streamline legal work, they create capacity, improve consistency, and allow teams to focus on higher-value outcomes.

Whether you're in a law firm, in-house team, or adjacent role in procurement or operations, we’ll help you achieve your ideal outcomes in the most practical and cost-effective way.

Gene and Allen - Coffee

Our Values

Built for Legal. Driven by Outcomes. Focused on You.
What guides our work:

Expertise With Empathy
We’ve lived the legal challenges we’re solving. That means we design with your day-to-day reality in mind.
Practical innovation
We focus on real results, combining proven tech with legal insight to solve problems quickly and sustainably.
Clarity and control
Transparent scoping, clear delivery timelines, and predictable pricing. We make it easy to move forward.
Continuous improvement
Better never stops! Whether it’s enabling AI features or iterating workflows, we’re with you for the long haul, not just one-off projects.
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Meet The Team

Managing Director

Gene Turner

Gene founded LawHawk with Allen Li in 2016 after a 17-year legal career, including six years as a corporate and finance partner at Buddle Findlay. He has also worked at Chapman Tripp, CMS Cameron McKenna (London), and Westpac.

Gene first implemented legal automation at Westpac in 2000, reducing document prep time from an hour to just minutes. Over time, it became clear that delivering automation at scale required a unique combination of legal, process, and tech skills, so Gene learned HotDocs and created LawHawk.

He holds an MBA (Distinction) from Victoria University (graduating first in class), serves on the Advisory Board for the Centre for Legal Innovation, and is a Fellow of World Commerce & Contracting. Gene brings his full range of skills to every project to maximise impact and outcomes.

 

Gene FV
Co-Founder

Allen Li

Before co-founding LawHawk, Allen worked at Buddle Findlay, and later at Barclays in London, where he managed a team responsible for negotiating derivatives documentation. He played a key role in automation and process improvement initiatives, particularly around complex legal documentation and stakeholder management.

Allen also brings in-house legal operations experience, having worked as Associate General Counsel – Legal Operations at Kāinga Ora. He understands both the challenges and the opportunities when legal teams partner with business and IT. Allen’s tremendous eye for detail ensures that every process he works on is tight and compliant, and his focus on useability and understanding different perspectives ensures solutions are happily and broadly adopted.

Allen FV

LawHawk’s Support Partners

Delivering the best outcomes means using the best technology and the best people at every step. A process is only as good as the weakest link.

Allen and Gene are among the best legal automators in the world and work with the best legal automation platforms for the markets we serve. But integrating legal compliance and best practices into broader business processes to deliver the best overall business outcomes – that requires a mix of technologies and skills that varies from project to project and exceeds what can be found in the small legal technology space.

To ensure best results and value for money, we’ve stayed focused on where we add most value and partnered with other experts who share our approach. With LawHawk as your key point of contact, we help our partners understand your unique requirements and how the overall solution will work, and they deliver the best of what’s possible in their spheres of expertise with the best business technology solutions.

See our Partners section for more details on the partners we work with, and the broader range of things we can help with.

Gene & Neha - 2

"We've got a system that makes the workflow of a business broker easier and more efficient. That means more time talking to buyers and sellers, and less time chasing paper."

David NewportBusiness Owner

"...the nature of the whole process has significantly improved. Business owners can put all the required information into one platform, and their accountants can add information as well, which eliminates double-handling. It's a huge time saver."

David NewportBusiness Owner

"LawHawk has been very responsive and great to work with, helping turn my big ideas into reality."

David NewportBusiness Owner

"LawHawk facilitated the whole process... They make sure the transition and whole system is set up really well"

Sam BaileySenior Legal Counsel, Air New Zealand

"It was important to us to have a local provider as part of the solution - first, to ensure we had a high level of responsiveness and secondly, to support local business"

Sam BaileySenior Legal Counsel, Air New Zealand

"For me, it's brilliant. I can just sit there watching requests come through. I can see them coming in. I can see them getting signed. I can see them going into SharePoint, all signed, all data tagged."

Tim RennieGeneral Counsel, LayBuy

"I think the benefit of working with LawHawk is that they help you focus your mind on what it is that you're trying to do. If you try and go for the most complex automation at the beginning, you'll probably just get nowhere... LawHawk has been critical for us in that regard."

Tim RennieGeneral Counsel, Laybuy

"I'm now meeting deadlines for filing, and have significantly improved the accuracy of my legal documentation... The processes are more efficient, which means I've achieved a major goal - that of time savings"

David PawsonDirector

"Automation means I know things are actually under control. The system is reliable, it's working, it removes that margin of error - that gives me business confidence and peace of mind."

David PawsonDirector

"People at Foodies who have used our automated contracts love that we have embraced legal innovation, with many really enjoying the process. It's not just the legal team who have been impressed by it and how easy it is to use. It is starting to represent significant time savings for other departments as well as ours."

Julian BenefieldAssociate General Counsel

"With greater accuracy from the automation, and the related review and approval processes, there's less chance a contract template can be completed incorrectly, which reduces the legal and project risk."

Julian BenefieldAssociate General Counsel

"Their ability to look at our problem, and help us identify our requirements, has been amazing. They're lawyers as well as software developers and they've got to know us."

Yazmin JunedAssociate General Counsel, Kāinga Ora

"LawHawk's document automation system means that there's not just a huge increase in productivity gain, but there's no compromise on quality."

Yazmin JunedAssociate General Counsel, Kāinga Ora

"The time savings Kāinga Ora are seeing from the automation project are huge. Where we produce contracts using the automation we average a 75% reduction in the time taken relative to the time had we not used automation."

Bruce RidenGeneral Counsel, Kāinga Ora

"We had to consider user experience - which comes at a cost - because traditionally users don't like change. So the more we could align an upgraded product to user needs, the better off we would be."

Julian FarberSolutions Architect, MinterEllisonRuddWatts

"LawHawk and ProLegalTech were instrumental in helping us come up with a solution when it became clear that the professional services fees others charged would be commercially impractical for a New Zealand law firm."

Tila HoffmanSpecial Counsel & Business Transformation Manager, MinterEllisonRuddWatts

"We've had tremendous uptake... We are already investigating how we can automate more workflows to further support our clients and staff."

Tila HoffmanSpecial Counsel & Business Transformation Manager, MinterEllisonRuddWatts

"The solutions LawHawk has delivered for us have transformed the way we do business and have driven value right throughout our organisation"

Ian MacKenzieHead of Legal, NZGIF

"LawHawk are, in my opinion, hands down the best service provider we use. We'll definitely be working with them in the future."

Ian MacKenzieHead of Legal, NZGIF
"We've always had to find ways of working smarter. We needed to find ways to automate processes that were repeatable and were taking up time, so that we could free up capacity for high value tasks."
Ian MacKenzieHead of Legal, NZGIF

"Initial delivery was very quick - only 3 weeks after we signed the contract, and the general functionality all worked straight away."

Phil HebdenCommercial Manager, Armstrong Downes Commercial

"It's an absolute success story. Our subcontractors are now signing agreements instantly off their mobile phones as they leave the pre-let meetings."

Phil HebdenCommercial Manager, Armstrong Downes Commercial

"Just do it. It saves so much time. It's not just a benefit from a financial point of view, but culturally for your staff too - which is priceless."

Phil HebdenCommercial Manager, Armstrong Downes Commercial

"Using the online contract template has allowed us to gain efficiencies and cost savings in terms of staff time. What previously took hours now takes minutes."

Neha GoyalLegal Operations Manager, Victoria University of Wellington

"[LawHawk] are also proactive. When they're presented with an idea or a pain point, they're able to provide a practical solution using language that is easily understandable by people who may not be so good with technology"

Neha GoyalLegal Operations Manager, Victoria University of Wellington

"[LawHawk] have been quite instrumental in creating a legal operations network and introducing people together and allowing various clients to speak to each other."

Neha GoyalLegal Operations Manager, Victoria University of Wellington

Our History

LawHawk launched in 2016 as New Zealand’s first dedicated legal automation consultancy. but its origins go back further. Gene Turner began automating legal documents in 2000, and over the following decade, saw a growing need for legal teams to combine legal thinking with automation design.
LawHawk has grown from that insight into a trusted partner for legal teams across New Zealand and Australia, supporting everything from quick-win automation projects to full-scale legal operations transformation.

  • 2000

    Gene implements automation at Westpac
  • 2012

    Gene adopts HotDocs in his law firm and learns automation. Starts with the most complex loan and security document package he works with. 

     

  • 2014/15

    Gene retires from the law firm, and having heard of cloud software, sees potential to offer automation as a service. The planning begins
  • 2016

    Allen joins, and LawHawk launched as a standalone business
  • 2019

    LawHawk and Housing New Zealand (now Kāinga Ora) win World Commerce & Contracting APAC Award for Operational Improvement

  • 2021

    LawHawk and Armstrong Downes win World Commerce & Contracting APAC Award for Operational Improvement

  • 2023

    LawHawk and New Zealand Green Investment Finance are finalists in World Commerce & Contracting APAC Award for Operational Improvement
  • Today

    Supporting legal teams across NZ, Australia, the United States and beyond 

Our Valued Clients

Trusted by legal teams across New Zealand, Australia, and beyond.
We work with forward-thinking organisations that value precision, partnership, and performance.

Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006

Regarding section 21 of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006, please note that although LawHawk’s key people are lawyers, LawHawk Limited is not and does not intend to be a lawyer or an incorporated law firm under that Act (or anything else referred to in that section). Because it is a company incorporated under the Companies Act 1993, it is a separate legal entity from its owners, directors, and employees. Your legal relationship is only with LawHawk Limited and not with them, and their status as lawyers or otherwise does not affect LawHawk Limited’s status. See our terms and conditions for more details.

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Eager To Learn More?

Let’s get started.

Whether you're rethinking contracts, streamlining legal ops, or simply want to work smarter, we’re ready to help.