Colin Lachance: LawQi

The legal profession is at a crossroads. AI is rapidly reshaping how knowledge work gets done, but many lawyers are stuck between curiosity and caution—eager to explore productivity gains, yet unsure how to use AI responsibly, accurately, and in alignment with professional obligations.¹ Traditional legal education formats haven’t helped much. As legal innovation leader Colin Lachance puts it, webinars and passive content fall short because AI skills must be practiced—not just explained.

Bar associations and legal organizations face a tough challenge: how do you equip thousands of lawyers with practical AI competency—without creating new risks around confidentiality, reliability, and compliance? Many firms can’t justify expensive, time-consuming training programs, and traditional “one-to-many” content delivery struggles to keep pace with fast-moving AI capabilities.¹

At the same time, access to AI education risks becoming uneven. Large firms can invest in training and internal tooling; smaller firms, solo practitioners, government attorneys, and in-house teams often cannot.¹ That gap threatens to create a two-tier profession where AI competency becomes an advantage reserved for those with bigger budgets.

To solve this, Colin Lachance (Principal of PGYA Consulting and former Innovator in Residence for the Ontario Bar Association) partnered with Praxis AI to build LawQi—an AI tutor designed to teach lawyers through AI, not just about AI.¹ What began as a digital twin of Lachance’s expertise evolved into a scalable learning platform that supports hands-on experimentation in a safe environment.¹

Inside the Ontario Bar Association (OBA) AI Academy, LawQi serves as an always-on learning assistant for 17,000 lawyer members, enabling practical, experiential learning at scale.¹ Instead of a static curriculum, lawyers can interact with the AI mentor, test scenarios, refine prompts, and build confidence through usage—exactly the kind of “get your hands dirty” learning model the profession needs.¹

The results and momentum were significant. The Canadian Bar Association expanded access to the AI Academy to its 38,000 national members, broadening the reach of hands-on AI education across Canada.¹ As one observer noted, “If you spend 20 minutes with this tool, you’ll be 80 percent ahead of the profession.”¹

LawQi is built on Praxis AI’s enterprise middleware platform, using AWS infrastructure with Amazon Bedrock for scalability—while maintaining the security and compliance expectations required in legal environments.¹ Importantly, Praxis AI’s approach emphasizes that quality improves with specialized context: rather than throwing “more data” at a model (which can make answers generic), LawQi is designed to perform better with carefully curated, domain-relevant sources—such as published guidance and ethics-related material relevant to attorney AI use.¹

LawQi’s assistant (built on Anthropic’s Claude) is designed to deliver answers in legal context and provide citations for responses—supporting trust and responsible learning.¹ The experience is intentionally engaging as well, with a distinctive tone that helps users come back and keep practicing.¹

LawQi’s learning architecture is structured around four practical skill zones, designed to move lawyers from beginner familiarity to real operational competence:¹

1. Basics — understanding generative AI concepts and common tools
2. Intermediate Skills — prompt engineering and tool mastery
3. Building with AI — creating apps and custom workflows
4. Governance — risk management, ethics, and regulatory compliance

This structure allows learners to progress in a way that matches how AI shows up in legal work: first understanding what’s possible, then improving technique, then applying AI to workflows, and finally operationalizing responsible use.¹

LawQi’s success in Ontario became a national proof point—and then a launchpad. The initiative led to LawQi Learning Inc., a joint venture between PGYA Consulting and Praxis AI, focused on expanding hands-on legal AI education to broader markets.¹ After launching at the NABE annual meeting, LawQi began working with U.S. bar associations to bring this model to legal communities across America.¹

LawQi shows what happens when you combine real expert instruction with an enterprise platform built for scale, governance, and context-aware learning. By turning Colin Lachance’s expertise into a living, interactive AI mentor—and delivering it through a secure, scalable architecture—Praxis AI helped bar associations move beyond passive training into experiential AI education for tens of thousands of legal professionals.¹

If your organization wants to scale expert knowledge safely and consistently, Praxis AI provides the middleware platform to make it real.