A small business in Australia that wants its WHS, privacy, and conduct documentation done properly faces three choices. The first is doing it yourself, which most small businesses do, badly. The second is downloading templates, which we covered last fortnight. The third is paying a law firm or compliance consultancy, which costs roughly $5,000 for the initial engagement and rarely less than $1,500 a year to keep current.
That $5,000 is the number we keep coming back to. It deserves its own article because the number itself isn't the problem. The problem is what you're actually buying.
The unbundled bill
Of a typical $5,000 compliance engagement, roughly 12% of the time is spent thinking. The lawyer or consultant reads about your business, identifies the regulatory landscape, and decides which Acts, Regulations, and Codes of Practice apply. That's the part you couldn't do yourself.
About 8% is spent advising. Phone calls, an in-person meeting, an email or two, sometimes a workshop with the team. That's the part where genuine value is exchanged — your specific operational circumstance meets the lawyer's accumulated case knowledge.
The remaining 80% is production. Pulling clauses from a precedent bank, swapping in your business name, your jurisdiction, your services, your headcount. Reformatting from the firm's house template. Cross-checking citations. Generating a hazard register. Drafting an incident notification flow that lists the right state regulator. Writing a SWMS for each of the high-risk activities your business actually performs.
That 80% is what AI does well. It is the work of a senior paralegal: high-volume, pattern-driven, demanding accuracy and consistency more than novel judgement. The hourly rate of a senior paralegal in a Sydney mid-tier firm is $280. The hourly rate of a partner who reviews their work is $750 to $1,100. You pay both, on every page.
What you don't pay for, but should
Here's the harder part. The lawyer's documents are static. They are written, delivered, and immediately begin to age. The Model WHS Regulations are amended on a rolling basis. The Privacy Act 1988 was meaningfully reformed in 2024. State-level Codes of Practice update every 18 to 36 months. Fair Work tweaks compliance obligations every budget cycle.
A $5,000 engagement gives you a perfect snapshot of your obligations on the day it was delivered. By month six, two clauses are subtly out of date. By month twelve, your hazard register no longer reflects current SafeWork guidance on silica dust exposure. By month eighteen, the privacy collection notice is missing two of the new Australian Privacy Principle requirements.
The fix is a "review" engagement. Another $1,500 to $3,000. Or — more commonly — you don't pay it, and your beautiful documents quietly drift away from compliance.
What we built instead
PolicyPack engineers compliance documents the same way the law firm does, then strips out the production cost and replaces the static document with one that updates itself.
The thinking step — which obligations apply to this business? — is encoded once, by lawyers and operators we worked with for nine months. Every business that flows through that logic gets the benefit of the same upfront work, distributed across thousands of operators instead of one.
The production step — write 120 pages of customised documentation — runs in 20 minutes against a context window that includes your industry, your state, your services, your headcount, your hazards, and the precise regulatory text we maintain. Every clause is generated, not pulled from a precedent bank, which means it can be rewritten when the regulation changes.
The advisory step — what about my specific edge case? — is where humans still add value. We surface those cases for human review on the Subscription tier. We are not selling you legal advice. We are selling you the 80% that lawyers shouldn't be charging you to produce in the first place.
The economic argument
A $199 PolicyPack with a $49/month Subscription costs $787 in the first year and $588 a year thereafter. A $5,000 engagement plus a $2,000 review costs $7,000 in the first year and $2,000 a year thereafter. Over five years, the engagement costs $15,000. The PolicyPack costs $3,139.
That ratio — five times the cost, for documentation that ages out faster — is what we're attacking.
We are not anti-lawyer. We are anti-lawyer-as-paralegal. When you have a genuinely novel risk — a complex contractor arrangement, a workplace fatality investigation, a class-action exposure — go and pay a partner $1,000 an hour to think about it. That's what their training is for. Don't pay them to format a hazard register.
That's what we do, for $199.