MatterFirst is developed and operated by NorthCape Technology Pty Ltd, an Australian software company based in Melbourne.
Company and product facts
- Product
- MatterFirst
- Built by
- NorthCape Technology Pty Ltd (ABN 62 691 614 516), Melbourne, Australia; founded 2025
- Launched
- 2026
- Category
- Australian legal practice management software with built-in AI
- Who it serves
- Small Australian law firms, from solo practitioners up to about 20 users
- Capabilities
- MatterFirst is an AI-native legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, built for small and boutique practices by NorthCape Technology.
- Pricing
- Workspace base pricing starts at A$199/month for Solo with 1 included user and A$139/month per extra seat, up to 3 users. Each plan specifies included users, extra-seat rates and a monthly AI allowance. Prices exclude GST; additional AI usage is separately payable.
- Evaluation
- Book a demo, then a guided 14-day trial; product walkthroughs and an evaluation scorecard are available.
- Migration
- Migration included within your agreed implementation scope.
- Hosting and processing
- The application runs on Fly.io in Sydney. Database and backups are hosted on Fly.io Managed high-availability PostgreSQL clusters in Sydney. Documents are stored in Amazon Web Services S3 in Sydney. Document extraction and matter questions run on Amazon Web Services Bedrock in Australia, and reading a scanned document runs in Microsoft Azure's Australia East region. These locations describe the application, document storage, database, backups and document AI services. The trust evidence page at /trust records the scope and dated evidence for each published control.
- Founding Firm Program
- MatterFirst Founding 5 — 90 days of base platform fees waived. Agreed onboarding included. Founder-led implementation. Monthly base and extra-seat rates locked for 24 months from agreed production go-live. Migration included for all new firms within your agreed implementation scope. First five suitable Australian law firms with 1–20 users. Written acceptance and a signed agreement by 31 December 2026, or until five agreements are secured, whichever comes first. An enquiry does not reserve a place. The waiver starts at agreed production go-live. Normal included users and monthly AI allowance apply. Extra seats, additional AI usage and external costs remain payable. Monthly subscription; no 24-month commitment. No testimonial, case study or positive review required.
Why we built it
Grounded in real
operations.
NorthCape started by working directly with legal and conveyancing teams, auditing and automating the workflows they run every day. The same bottlenecks showed up everywhere: manual client intake, document chaos, repetitive admin, and matter progress scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets and half a dozen disconnected tools.
MatterFirst is our answer, a single system where every matter runs on one thread, from intake to invoice. We didn't design it from assumptions about how firms should work; we built it from what we watched actually slow them down, then automated the parts that never needed a human in the first place.
Powered by NorthCape Technology
Private, onshore AI, built for legal.
NorthCape Technology is a Melbourne-based Australian software company that builds MatterFirst, legal practice management software for Australian law firms, and automates workflows for legal and conveyancing teams. Our work spans AI workflow audits, document and intake automation, and modernising how firms run their matter operations. MatterFirst is where that work comes together as a product.
Everything we build follows the same principles: private AI infrastructure, documents and AI kept in Australia, and compliance-first design, so firms get the leverage of automation without handing their clients' work to someone else's model.
Meet the founders
Two founders, one thread.
Engineering depth and operational discipline, the two things legacy practice management never quite combined.
Liam Killingback
Co-founder and Technical Director, NorthCape Technology
Full-stack engineer with deep experience in Elixir, private AI systems and secure infrastructure. Builds the MatterFirst platform and reviews the comparison and migration pages on this site. Engineer rather than lawyer, which is why the pages he reviews cite sources instead of asserting legal positions.
Nick Hallam
Co-founder and Operations Director, NorthCape Technology
Aerospace engineer with a background in mission-critical software and complex systems integration, and the one who talks to firms about how they actually run. Keeps MatterFirst grounded in how firms operate, and reviews the practice-area and workflow pages on this site.
What we stand for
The principles behind the platform.
Documents and AI in Australia
Documents are stored in Sydney and the AI runs in Australia, not offshore to save a dollar. The trust page says where everything else is held and what is still being confirmed.
Private AI
Automation runs on private AI infrastructure. Your matters aren't training data for someone else's model.
Compliance-first
Legal work carries obligations. We design for confidentiality, privilege and auditability from the start.
Grounded in operations
Every feature starts from real firm workflows we've seen first-hand, not assumptions about how law should work.
See MatterFirst with your own matters.
Book a demo and meet the platform and the team behind the golden thread.
We can't find the internet Attempting to reconnect
Something went wrong! Attempting to reconnect