Four ways AI is shaking up Singapore’s legal practice

From classrooms to courtrooms, artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how law is taught, practiced, and delivered in Singapore.

As public and private sectors collaborate to push boundaries, Singapore’s legal sector is quickly becoming a global model for AI-driven legal innovation.

In his address to new lawyers (non-practitioners) who were called to the Bar at the supreme court in April, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon highlighted the rise in generative AI (GenAI) and its implications on the legal fraternity.

According to him, young lawyers need to be aware of both the capabilities and limitations of GenAI and be equipped with the skills to utilise it in the day to day.

Chief Justice Menon stated that there was a need to rethink how to train young lawyers.

AI tools have evolved rapidly and have proved their to even outperform lawyers at times in areas such as summarisation of documents and analysis of court transcripts, Chief Justice Menon continued.

GovInsider highlights some of the breakthroughs that have been achieved in the use of AI in the legal sector.  

1. Legal upskilling 

Director at the Centre for Workplace and Learning Innovation at the Institute for Adult Learning (IAL), Associate Professor Sim Soo Kheng noted during the Adult Learning Xchange conference organised by IAL on May 29 that it is no longer true that AI adoption is very slow.

In fact, this is reflected in the keen uptake of AI in all levels of the legal sector, from law school training to AI use in the courtroom in recent years. 

Presenting at the same session, Chief Legal Officer and Senior Director of Learning and Professional Development Division at the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL), Delphine Loo noted that “skills are becoming particularly important, because junior lawyers are now expected to carry a heavier role because they need to hit the ground running and contribute immediately”.

Considering this, Loo shared that SAL worked with Frontiermind, to develop a GenAI app featuring an avatar that trained both soft skills and technical knowledge.

SAL has developed three learning modules for the app, namely Strategic Negotiation, Handling Difficult Witnesses, and Therapeutic Justice.

According to Loo, the Therapeutic Justice module was especially applicable to family lawyers who wish to hone their therapeutic skills and learn to use the right language to “defuse and de-escalate very tense family conflict”.

“We realised that actually, this is suitable not just for lawyers, but for people who need to negotiate in their day-to-day lives,” she adds.

The GenAI application allowed users to practice multiple times and even get a “passing grade” in the module in their own time without the need for employees to share the information with employers.

In this way, younger, more inexperienced lawyers are able to be better hone their skills for their legal service beyond academic instruction.

Loo stated that SAL is also exploring GenAI to train senior lawyers to better mentor their juniors to bridge the skills gap more effectively in the workplace.

2. Reinventing the classroom

Come August, large language models (LLMs) like ScholAIstic will also be implemented in law classrooms to help students practice soft skills such as cross-examination.

This example was shared by AI Centre for Educational Technologies (AICET)’s Director and AI Singapore’s Chief Data Officer, Associate Professor Ben Leong who also presented at the Adult Learning Xchange organised by IAL.

He shared that the LLM could play the role of different court participants, including the judge and opposing counsel. Students would then act as the defence counsel to cross-examine the witness.

The LLM would also provide feedback on questioning by the student that may be done incorrectly. Leading questions, for instance, such as “are you guilty” would be intervened and the LLM, who can act as the judge, would object and correct students.

3. GenAI in court

Beyond lower-level instruction, AI is already being implemented in the Singapore Courts.

Since August 2023, GenAI programme Harvey AI has been deployed to users in the Small Claims Tribunal (SCTs), which sees approximately 10,000 cases a year.

At the Standing International Forum of Commercial Courts in April 2024, Justice Goh Yihan stated that the goal was to use Harvey to “answer legal queries, help users prepare their case for hearing, and even provide a preliminary assessment of the likely outcome of cases.”

The SCTs have also utilised Harvey to translate court correspondence into Chinese, Malay and Tamil for documents in cases filed there.

According to Chief Justice Menon in SCTs 40th Anniversary commemoration in April, the incorporation of technology enhances access to justice and safeguards public trust in Singapore’s justice system.

4. Tapping AI in practice

Harvey has also been adopted by various medium and large law firms in Singapore, including several Big Four law firms such as Rajah & Tann and WongPartnership.

This aimed to help streamline tasks such as drafting, contract review and analysis, summarising legal documents and correspondence work to make legal work more efficient.

Alongside Harvey, GPT-Legal is another GenAI model implemented to address Singapore’s unique legal landscape.

Speaking at GovInsider’s Festival of Innovation, Deputy Director, Incubation, Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Singapore, Janet Chiew, shared how the GenAI model was designed to understand and process legalese, documents and case law unique to Singapore’s legal system.

Moreover, as GPT-Legal has been trained on LawNet data, Singapore’s primary portal for legal research, it can understand the nuances of Singapore law.

She shared that the key focus of the GPT model was that of legal document summarisation, reducing summary time from two days to approximately 10 minutes.

IMDA has also implemented safeguards to address potential AI hallucinations, flagging parts of the summary that may be poorly substantiated, and providing a “fact score” metric to better understand summary reliability.

At the more macro level, the “Copilot for SG law firms” module was jointly launched by Singapore’s Ministry of Law and Lupl during the TechLaw.Fest 2024 held in September.

This launch integrated the Microsoft 365 AI platform, Copilot, with the Legal Technology Platform (LTP), enabling users to incorporate GenAI into their practice management and workflow plans.

LTP was one of the first sector-specific technology solutions to be integrated with Microsoft Copilot in Singapore.

In September 2024, the then Minister for Culture, Community and Youth, and Second Minister for Law, Mr Edwin Tong SC commented that this now allowed lawyers to apply GenAI “directly to the cases and matters they have on hand” and that “[this] will bring greater efficiency and time savings, allowing [lawyers] to focus on higher value work and enhancing the way they deliver services to their clients”.