As the saying goes, “Ask a hundred lawyers and you’ll get a hundred answers”. Ask over a hundred lawyers about legal tech and the picture becomes even less clear. The legal tech ecosystem itself is so fragmented that almost no two GCs have the same thing in mind when talking about their use of technology.
Some companies are, to varying degrees of sophistication, implementing forms of automation or AI to solve legal or contractual issues, others are partnering with law firms to produce software capable of handling very specific issues like ISDAs, CLOs or loan documentation. But those applications of legal tech remain in the minority. Clearly, there is a distinction between legally useful technology and legal tech. Some basic elements of every office’s software suite can be legally useful, though they are not generally badged as legal tech.
The results of our survey show that by far the most common use of legal tech, shared by nearly a third (32%) of teams, was contract management. However, the overall picture is one of a market still in its infancy. Respondents were as likely to use tech to manage relationships with their external firms (17%) or handle invoicing (14%) as they were to do automate legal advice.
Notably, these trends affected companies of all sizes: those employing more than 50,000 people and with legal teams with over 100 staff were no more likely to use advanced legal tech than small to medium-sized organisations. This should come as no surprise. Even companies that specialise in developing very sophisticated technology face the same issues as their less technologically advanced counterparts when it comes to finding solutions for the legal team.
As one respondent representing a Hong Kong-based tech and IT solutions company commented, ‘As a provider of services then of course [the business] will have all this fancy technology, but most companies are much more sophisticated at developing things for clients than for themselves. As a user, as a GC using software to do something, you are in the same box as everybody else.’
Clearly, more money is invested in the revenue-generating side of a business than on its support functions. As experimental psychology has shown time and again, people naturally favour making gains over protecting losses, and businesses seem to be no different.
‘Take a large bank,’ continues our respondent. ‘It may have well over 1,600 lawyers globally. That bank is effectively running a top 20 law firm in terms of its legal staff, and that’s before you even consider its far larger compliance team. Yet when you look at how it is doing its legal work it will be nowhere near as sophisticated as a law firm. To understand why that should be the case you’ve got to consider that the law firm is practicing law as a business whereas the in-house counsel is a cost. Anything that solves a problem for in-house counsel therefore needs to be quantified as a cost saving when proposed to the business, which makes it much harder to justify.’
‘Even the most persuasive pitch for new legal technologies looks unappealing to most businesses because all you’re doing is comparing one cost with another cost: the cost of technology vs the cost of salaries to do the same job. Either way you’re reinforcing the view that you are a drag on the business that will incur costs! It’s not at all true – those are jobs that need to be done, but it’s how people will see it.’
Innate risk aversion when it comes to corporate budgeting is only part of the story, however. Part of the answer to why GCs struggle to acquire technology lies within the legal team itself. First, lawyers tend to be poor at understanding and explaining their technology needs. They may understand their legal needs very well, but this does not necessarily translate into seeing what sorts of tools they need to accomplish that end.
As another respondent pointed out, it also requires a lot of time and no small amount of skill to adequately benchmark legal tech. ‘Even doing the work to see whether an automatic translation service for legal documentation is efficient if automated and whether that can be measured in terms of efficiency gains is not something I would expect many GCs to successfully handle. Lawyers are generally terrible at that sort of exercise, which is a procurement exercise we are just not trained in.’
But – and this is neither the first nor last time this will be said about the subject of legal tech – a change may be about to come.
Over two thirds (68%) of those surveyed said that the use of technology within the legal team had increased significantly over the past five years. Just 5% reported that their use of technology had not increased at all. The bulk (95%) of respondents though that legal tech would end up significantly enhancing the day-to-day operations of the legal team, while nearly three quarters (73%) said they would like to step up their use of technology.
Perhaps a clearer indication of this change is that, for all their cynicism over tech, GCs are not disputing that it has changed the profession – 87% of respondents said that legal tech had already changed the industry to at least some extent. Even more strikingly, 95% of GCs felt legal tech would change the industry in the coming years, with 33% saying that the change would be significant.
The number one goal of innovation in our legal team, in an organisation manufacturing basic commodities, is to be able to do more with less – to consistently deliver high quality outputs at lower cost, so we are contributing to improving our organisation’s profit. There’s always pressure to keep costs to the minimum, but there is also a particular risk in needing to do more and more in terms of meeting increasing compliance requirements whilst containing costs.
The second goal is to increase reliability. There are more regulatory requirements to deal with and more things being asked of us, and to do that confidently and efficiently we need to make sure that the information and the processes we’ve got to be able to do that are robust and reliable – so I know that when the CEO wants a piece of information I can produce it reasonably quickly, and we are providing various stakeholders with confidence about our organisation’s governance.
We’re in the early stages of looking to see what new legal technology is available that can successfully meet our needs. I’ve been an in-house lawyer for over 20 years now and am probably one of the longest serving in-house lawyers in Australia. I use a basic, but robust and reliable system which has served us well.
We use a SQL Server relational database for recording and linking all the information we use every day, such as information about matters we are working on, agreements, property details, intellectual property, company details, and external lawyers’ fees, but we are looking to upgrade from this. We have been looking at what there is on the market, and there have been some quite interesting developments in terms of matter management. Overall, our organisation does not have a consistent process for information management, leaving it to particular teams to make their own arrangements.
Marcus Clayton
We have had a lot of growth over the time I’ve been here and we’re a much bigger company now, with more operations, more people, and more issues that need to be resolved every day. We are in a period of rapid change for our organisation. One aspect of this is the organisation is about to embark on a digital transformation project planned to unlock value, including a focus on the benefits from automation and smart analysis of our financial and operating systems and processes. We’re also looking at how that works for us in the legal team, to bring it all together over the next probably six months, against the objectives of robustness and reliability that I mentioned before.
We are currently looking at NetDocuments, iManage and a couple of other leading information management systems and are also looking around for matter management systems. What did surprise us was that there was not really one overall, out of the box, comprehensive package available for the typical needs of an in-house counsel team like ours.
We try to keep things as simple as we can, and we prefer just to go out and get something that is going to do what we want off the shelf. Our needs will be similar to many other companies’ needs. Given that we already have a good simple set up, we don’t want to have something new that is of a proprietary nature and forces you to go down a route in doing things their way, that may not align with our preferences, and could provide less functionality than we’ve got at the moment.
A couple of high-level IT leaders I have worked with recently, inside and outside our organisation, have confirmed a contemporary approach is to use out of the box wherever you can. They also reinforced a strong preference for a cloud-based approach, rather than on premises facilities.
We have quite a free rein in terms of what technology we can onboard within the team. Of course, if it doesn’t work or deliver value, I carry the can for that. To learn about the value of the technology which is now available, we went out and got anecdotal evidence, did research, and then followed up with a few of the aggregator providers about what they would recommend. That led us to talking to some people, getting some demonstrations and forming our views.
I was surprised at the low estimates for setting up this system and migrating our data. I feared from previous experience that the actual costs could be greater than the optimistic forecasts, so in the budget I’ve put in a more realistic amount than has been suggested for a migration (which of course we will manage carefully). I’ve also said we want to do it in incremental stages, which helps us manage the transition risks.
We’re a small department, who operate in a company that has traditionally run everything very lean. That’s the environment I’ve been working in for a long time with colleagues in the legal team. We evaluate our technology intuitively and based on how much it is actually helping us to achieve our objectives. Having said that, we are building KPIs into our assessment process at the moment as part of our structured evaluation procedure.
When staying abreast of what legal technology is available, organisations such as ALITA are useful and easy to access to corroborate what we’re finding in other places, and help us to test things anecdotally against promotional material or the stated capabilities of the tech.
I’ve followed what’s going on in artificial intelligence relevant to our responsibilities, and I can see where it will have application, but in our case we are a heavy manufacturing industrial company which doesn’t have a lot of low-value, high volume legal work. We leverage our internal expertise with carefully selected external advisors who we are confident will apply themselves creatively and deliver value for us, and while I currently don’t see a big role for AI in our legal team on a regular basis, we’re continuing to monitor its progress. We have used AI in certain cases, for instance during some major litigation, and I was really impressed with the quality that came back from applying AI to our discovery records. Automation, AI, and machine learning are opportunities we are planning to exploit for our heavy manufacturing business, with an expectation of significant benefits, so we are on the look out for where these sort of opportunities might be there for the legal function also.
COVID-19 and its effects have of course had an influence on the way we are working at the moment. From March to July, everyone was working from home, and in July we cautiously moved back to offices, following a contingency plan which for us had a ‘team A’ and ‘team B’ that were in the office on alternating weeks.
We are operating throughout Australia, so we have had experience with the different situations in the different states. We’ve had experience with all the video conferencing facilities, and have had a major rollout of hardware and software to people who weren’t using stuff in a mobile way to the same extent as others. In our legal function we’re all equipped with laptops and iPads, and because (pre-COVID-19) we’re often all around the country, it wasn’t a great change for us. The relational database that I mentioned before has given us a really solid framework for our essential information, so that even though the team’s been at home for some time over lockdown, we’ve been able to continue all of that essential stuff without any glitches whatsoever.
Going forward, I think that technology will change the roles of in-house lawyers in a more subtle way than many are predicting. Some tech that we use, such as hearings via video conferences, can be used tactically, and you need to consider that before being pushed down a certain path – should you agree to videoconference or not agree? Are you giving up some advantage if witnesses are not being cross examined in person, or if your representatives are interacting with the court in different ways? This shows that technology needs to be adopted in a measured way, because there are just too many side issues that come up.
Our Annual General Meeting (AGM) was in May, so we had to deal with how we were going to do this in the middle of the pandemic, with the restrictions on meetings. This quickly exposed us to virtual AGMs, but these are still not that straightforward. We did a hybrid AGM, which went well apart from the fact that a third-party tech provider played the CEO’s speech before the Chairman’s speech. It was simple human error, despite numerous rehearsals undertaken and the procedures we had in place. Most viewers would not notice, but it just highlighted that there are risks in new technology. Next year, I think we’ll probably still do a hybrid AGM, but we will have learned the lessons, I don’t think we’ll move to a fully virtual AGM.
Young lawyers who will have to drive the profession’s use of technology forward should be clear about what they are trying to achieve from legal tech. That’s cost efficiencies, delivering valued outcomes, avoiding surprises, and having reliable information and systems and tools to be able to do the task that you’re responsible for dependably. Everything comes back to that, and that’s what we’re trying to do in order to deliver value for our shareholders. You need to have a mindset that is going to let you understand how you can use the technology and the potential developments to further what the organisation is trying to achieve. You can’t be divorced from the underlying nature of the business.
Networking, as any diligent MBA-holder will tell you, is essential for an eye on corporate leadership. But finding the time to network is often the last thing on a busy lawyer’s mind.
How things change.
Several months into lockdown, finding effective ways to network has become the only escape route from sliding into set ways of doing things. ‘Remote work is the future of work’, says Amar Sundram, head of legal for RBS India. ‘That means we need to come up with new ways of forming and building relationship and keeping on top of changes in the way other organisations are doing things.’
Nowhere is this truer than the world of legal technology. For many GCs, keeping up with the pace of new technology was challenge enough. The pandemic has only made that job more difficult. As a result, a growing number of GCs are seeking out new forms of community building, networking and peer learning to help them cope. Suddenly, professional learning networks (PLNs) have become all the rage.
Across Asia Pacific, a raft of dedicated tech networks aimed at training and educating GCs has sprung up, from the Australian legal Technology Association (ALTA) to the Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) in Singapore. These organisations do many things, but all of them aim at a common goal. As Josh Lee Kok Thong, chair of the Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (ALITA), puts it, they ‘encourage lawyers to take learning into their own hands, to be more interested in the technology and other disruptive forces that can affect their work’.
As peer networks become an increasingly important way for GCs across Asia Pacific to engage with legal tech, we canvas some of the leading institutions, and their members, on what it means for lawyers’ engagement with technology.
Master PLN
Among the largest informal member networks is the aforementioned ALITA, a regional coordination platform that seeks to promote legal innovation and technology initiatives. The organisation launched in 2019 with a bold mission statement to make Asia a hub for legal innovation. It is, says ALITA’s Singapore-based chair Josh Lee Kok Thong, the first truly Asia Pacific wide legal tech forum.
‘This was a great chance to bring together a vibrant ecosystem and show the significant advances in the development of legal innovation and technology in all countries across Asia Pacific.’
‘While each country has its own legal tech networks, we felt the cross-border interaction was missing. We wanted to give a voice to the region, to promote collaboration opportunities across the region. The results so far have shown just how much progress can be made when GCs and thought leaders from different countries work together to share experiences, context and opportunities.’
ALITA has grown rapidly to around 150 member organisations in 20 countries. The membership includes some of the world’s largest law firms and technology companies, as well as universities, think tanks, legal tech companies, and governmental or quasi-governmental organisations. It is also fast becoming a leading platform for the region’s general counsel.
Narae Lee, lawyer, Bliss Law Office
Narae Lee is a Seoul-based lawyer at Bliss Law Office and an organiser at Seoul Legal Hackers, a separate discussion forum for issues arising at the intersection of law and technology. She recently joined ALITA’s steering committee and says the regional focus will be invaluable to the GC community.
‘Legal Hackers is an international organisation, so I already had the benefit of that cross-border perspective. However, when it comes to the use of legal technology there are nuances of context that matter. As counsel in Korea I will have a very different set of pressures, expectations and possibilities to someone based in Europe or the US.’
‘Generally, it’s useful to have a forum that looks at what other people facing these same issues are doing. The best way to learn about legal technology is to speak with others who are using it and know what it can and can’t do.’
Though still relatively young as an organisation, ALITA is already expanding its activities to create what Josh Lee Kok Thong describes as ‘probably the world’s first legal tech observatory.’
‘Just as an observatory contains a set of tools that help stargazers absorb data and information, draw patterns, and observe movement, we are creating a set of tools to help the legal community scan the Asia Pacific region. Above all, we want to make it a live observatory that feeds people with information on the initiatives that are taking place across Asia, so that actionable insights can be drawn.’
State of the future: Singapore’s bid to become a legal tech hub
The Government of Singapore has set its sights on a new and unexpected industrial development plan: developing the island state into a legal technology powerhouse. GCs speaks to the people looking to make these plans a reality.
Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has pioneered an economic model like no other. By combining a free market and open-economy with strong government involvement, the island state has grown at a breakneck speed to become, on a per-capita basis, one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
The lessons of this economic model, poured over by policy makers and business analysts ever since, break down to three things: decide what you want to be a world leader in, back the industry so it has all the conditions needed to thrive, and stay the course.
Singapore’s legal market has been following this rule book for at least two decades. First, in the early 2000s, foreign lawyers were permitted to set up Joint Law Ventures (JVLs) with local firms, a move then Attorney General Chan Sek Keong said would make it a ‘one-stop shop’ for cross border transactions. Since then, the government has been a staunch supporter of its legal industry, developing a world-class arbitration infrastructure and a judiciary that is unparalleled in the region.
When Singapore launched Asia’s first legal technology start-up accelerator in 2019, it was legal tech’s time to take the limelight. Backed by generous research grants, ambitious accelerator programs and direct financial support, Singapore’s legal tech providers had become the latest champions of future prosperity.
If you build it, they will come
When it comes to legal technology, GCs often face a dilemma. While many know what they would like technology to do, they often find themselves disappointed by the marketplace. In short, there is a huge gap between the legal technology that is available and effective now, and technologies with the potential to be truly disruptive.
It was precisely this dilemma that led Singapore to establish The Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP). Now under the aegis of the Singapore Academy of law, FLIP first emerged out of discussions at the Committee on the Future Economy (CFE), a governmental body founded in 2016 to help Singapore’s economy adapt to the market conditions likely to prevail over the coming years.
Paul Neo, Singapore Academy of Law’s chief operating officer, says the initiative helped draw attention to the economic potential of legal tech.
‘A lot of people knew there were all these bottlenecks in the legal market caused by poor adoption or adaption of technology, but the hard evidence was missing. We needed to take the lay of the land and understand the market through surveys and discussions, which we distilled into our “101 Industry Problem Statements”. That had a number of positive effects in terms of understanding the market, but it also allowed us to show potential investors the huge demand out there, emphasising the rewards available should these problems be solved.
‘A lot of technologists focus on fintech rather than legal tech, so this initiative helped to display to them the opportunities available in legal tech innovation. While there were already a lot of tech accelerators in Singapore, none of them were focused on legal tech, which has its own unique issues. To build one, we had to partner with existing accelerators who knew how to scale companies and had general business know-how, to which we added in our legal expertise.’
That led Neo to found the Global Legal Innovation Digital Entrepreneurship Program (GLIDE). In its early days, the initiative was aimed at Singapore’s investors, but the ambitious attempt to turn legal tech into an investment class has caught the attention of investors far beyond the island state’s borders.
‘Whenever I visit London, law firms and legal community builders want to know about the marketing work being done by the FLIP program’, says Chan Zi Quan, co-founder and CEO of Intelllex, a Singapore-based law tech startup offering an intelligent knowledge management system that allows lawyers to search for, store and share knowledge. Quan, who sat on the minister’s committee during the early days of FLIP. ‘They can see the beneficial effects it is having and are interested in replicating its success.’
Quan, who sat on the minister’s committee during the early days of FLIP, says that while the idea of legal tech providers receiving state funding may seem unusual, it was exactly what the market needed to take off.
‘The legal industry is rather fragmented when compared to other sectors. For example, in shipping or manufacturing there is much more consolidation and it is not at all unusual to see the government step in and offer support. But for a tech provider that caters to all sort of businesses, from SMEs right up to blue-chip global companies, it is much more difficult to make a case for that level of support.’
‘This sort of government support has really boosted our legitimacy. The due diligence they conduct on suppliers has really helped grow community trust.’
While Intelllex itself was deemed too mature to benefit from FLIP or GLIDE – it was, says Quan, ‘founded before there was even a term like “legal tech” to describe what we were doing’ – it was recently approved as a preferred supplier by Tech-celerate For Law, a support scheme for the adoption of technology solutions launched by the Law Society of Singapore, in partnership with Ministry of Law, Enterprise Singapore and Info-Communications Media Development (IMDA). The programme aims to help Singapore-based legal entities compete in the global marketplace, underlining the government’s commitment to its vision of a tech-enabled legal marketplace.
Under the Tech-celerate programme, Singapore-based legal practices are awarded 80% of the costs for any new technology implemented for the first year of use, allowing vendors much-needed time to establish proof of concept and refine their offering.
The infrastructure put in place by the government of Singapore has also attracted tech talent from other markets. Workflow automation software provider Checkbox was founded in Australia in 2016. It has since grown at an impressive rate, tripling its user base over the past year. But, says co-founder and CEO Evan Wong, its experiences in Singapore were transformational.
‘We were part of a competition at TechLaw.Fest that involved a number of rounds of pitching at the conference after a rigorous vetting process. After winning this, it really helped to lift the profile of the company and allowed us to move into the GLIDE program. From there, things started to really take off for Checkbox in Singapore.’
The road ahead
Even more ambitious plans are underway to make sure Singapore is at the forefront of legal tech. The government has made a bold statement through its S$15 million National Research Foundation grant to the Singapore Management University (SMU). This will see the creation of a new Computational Law Centre and research program at SMU, fulfilling SMU Principal Investigator Wong Meng Weng’s strategic vision for the development of legal technology at the University.
Jerrold Soh, assistant professor of law, SMU
The Computational Law Center ambitious flagship project will attempt to build a domain-specific language for law, something Jerrold Soh, assistant professor of law at SMU, says has far-reaching implications for the legal industry.
‘The analogy I would use is that we are doing something similar to what Adobe did with PDFs. Computational law is essentially expressing legal rules as computable units that can be calculated through logical operations. Our project starts with a basic tool, the domain-specific language, and builds legal tools on top of this. For example, someone writing a contract would be able to define the terms and mechanisms in a code-like language so it can be understood by the system. You could then run a check to see if it contains logical errors or has terms not defined’.
‘More importantly, you could also port this code-like language over to various natural languages. Once you have it in a condensed, pure logical form it’s easily translatable between different languages at once. Mandarin to English is doable, for instance, which will have many applications’.
These developments in computational law would not only improve the efficiency of legal tech, but could represent a sea-change in the capabilities of human-machine interfaces more broadly. But, as with most ambitious projects, it remains a moonshot. ‘It sounds like we’ve got it all figured out, but we haven’t’ says Soh. ‘It’s a big research project that will take a lot of time and effort to accomplish’.
With the Government of Singapore now backing legal tech, finding the resources to accomplish these ambitions should not be a problem.
These ground-up attempts to share information sit alongside more formal initiatives to develop awareness of legal tech organised by the region’s academic institutions. Perhaps the most advanced of these is The Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) run by the Singapore Management University and the Singapore Academy of Law. FLIP has issued a series of roadmaps on the future of legal innovation in the Asia Pacific region, which were highly praised by the GCs we spoke to for this report.
Australian institutions have also been notable for their activities to promote legal tech. The country’s largest postgraduate legal practice education provider, the College of Law, runs the Centre for Legal Innovation (CLI), a legal innovation and tech think tank focusing on emerging legal practice, future legal tech, innovation and entrepreneurship in the legal industry.
The focus throughout these activities, says CLI executive director Terri Mottershead, is on practical actions, and while CLI is actively monitoring market trends, it is ‘more interested in understanding how to those trends can be translated into solutions.’ For example, CLI offers a programme called Reinvent Legal Business, which looks at the various changes that have been taking place in the industry, covering everything from in-house initiatives to the work being done by law firms and alternative legal service providers.’ One of the biggest shifts across the profession, says Mottershead, has been the growing interest in technology among lawyers.
‘We have seen a real shift in the uptake of technology, particularly in the wake of COVID-19. As part of our Digital Literacy series we are looking at how we can provide support for lawyers to use technology effectively and help them understand how it can be incorporated into their practice.’
Sheldon Renkema, general legal manager, Wesfarmers
CLI, which has branched out from Australia to establish bases in New Zealand and Singapore and, more recently, the UK, does not operate like a traditional network. It offers the bulk of its courses and services for free ‘to help promote the sharing of information’. Recently, it has been devoting more time to vendor-led demonstrations of the newest legal tech from around the world.
‘It’s not intended as a sales pitch’, says Mottershead. ‘It is an opportunity for tech developers to explain the gap they sought to bridge and how they did it, while also giving them a chance to listed to the needs and feedback of end users.’
‘In fact, we have noticed that many lawyers are receptive to seeing how the technology works. The demos have been popular, and we have been holding more and more of them to help meet demand. That suggests to me that lawyers have a big appetite to understand the systems and tools that are available to them.’
Sheldon Renkema, general manager for legal at industrials conglomerate Wesfarmers and the Australia regional co-lead for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), has a similar take on the value of per-to-peer learning in a fragmented legal tech market.
‘One of the great things about CLOC is that you can very easily learn from what others are doing, so that you’re not reinventing the wheel. You are learning from others’ experiences so it’s a really good forum for embarking on that journey, connecting with people who’ve been through similar experiences and being able to benefit from their experience [of] the things that have gone well or not gone well in that specific context’.
Haebin Lee, research manager of the crypto finance division, Block Crafters
‘It’s very difficult to actually objectively assess whether what [legal tech providers] are saying their product or service delivers is actually what it delivers. Being able to leverage the experience of people who have used those products and services to see what the actual output is very helpful’.
Across Asia Pacific, universities and academic institutions are rolling out a variety of courses that bring aspects of IT and computational thinking skills to a legal audience, alongside a much wider number of courses that teach lawyers about the business impacts of tech and innovation. Some, such as the Singapore Management University, have gone further and now offer combined law and technology degrees.
Haebin Lee, research manager of the crypto finance division at Korea-based Block Crafters, agrees, and gives weight to the idea that membership organisations are the best way for GCs to move the industry forward:
‘There should be more a lot more discussion on how we should shape legal tech, and which direction we should take with new technology. That’s what we’ve been striving to do through Seoul Legal Hackers and ALITA: open up a room for free discussion.’
Path of least resistance
Free discussion and knowledge sharing are changing the way GCs learn about and interact with legal tech, but at a certain point this enthusiasm for change hits hard problems. As Nilanjan Sinha, head legal for Indian multinational banking and financial services company ICICI Bank, observes:
‘Legal tech, perhaps because of the mindset of lawyers, is not as disruptive a space as it could be. The problems have been identified, and various solutions have been proposed by service providers. The hope is that as people become more used to using tech and working from home there will be a greater uptake, but there remain obstacles.’
‘Senior management needs to buy in to a particular way of working for new practices to become widespread. As GCs we have a big responsibility to oversee and facilitate that change within the team.’
An even bigger problem, and one identified by many of the regional organisations we spoke to, is that lawyers’ mindsets need to shift before the profession embraces technology. As Sinha notes, ‘It may take time but there will be greater efficiencies on an ongoing basis if we make the effort now.’
New Ways of Working
Near universally, the global pandemic has forced a fundamental rethink as to how many of us live our lives, be it personally, professionally or otherwise. The legal sector in Asia-Pacific has proved no exception, with the past year providing an impetus for innovation and an acceleration of technology-based solutions.
‘Technology is not only changing how lawyers work on a day-to-day basis; it is reshaping some of the most fundamental aspects of law,’ says Vinay Ahuja, Partner – Indonesia, Lao PDR & Thailand and Head of Indonesia Practice at DFDL Tax & Legal.
‘Consider the huge changes that have taken place in courts across Asia. As someone who grew up and practised in India until 2010, I can safely say that it has come as a big surprise to see India’s courts embracing virtual hearings!’
While virtual courts may be one of the most immediately recognisable changes to legal practice – particularly for those outside of the legal sphere – for both in-house counsel and their law firm counterparts, the day-to-day differences in regular work habits are perhaps even more pronounced.
‘Today, law firms are typically arranging for client meetings and negotiations to be carried out via video conferences, while webinars are frequently being arranged for a range of purposes, including external seminars for clients, as well as internal training sessions for lawyers within the firm,’ says Zhuowei (Joyce) Li, partner at Han Kun Law Offices.
‘The COVID-19 pandemic has made organisations more reliant on technology than ever and as a result, when using technology tools for remote work, privacy and security have become a more critical issue.’
Concerns around privacy and security are unsurprisingly not limited to law firms. Cybersecurity was one of the most frequently cited concerns related to technology that the in-house counsel who took part in the research for this report raised, with the sensitive nature of legal work, in addition to the risks associated with data breaches, both front of mind.
‘With the emergence of new technologies and more broadly, changes in business trends, in-house clients are increasingly moving towards technology-enabled services,’ says Janet Toh Yoong Sang, partner at Shearn Delamore & Co.
‘This has resulted in new and different inquiries coming from clients, with advice sought on issues around data security and risks associated with the use of technology-enable services, as well as an uptick in the number of clients conducting risk assessments of third-party technology providers before consideration of services for contracting can begin.’
These issues speak to the need to establish new frameworks to deal with technology-related issues and are translating to a rise in new types of work for private practice lawyers. Multiple WSG member firms have reported that they are being instructed to advise clients on legal issues arising from the use of technology in remote working scenarios – including the issuance of guidelines for video conferencing software and collaborative working applications – a trend that all expected to continue to evolve as businesses and law firms alike come to terms with new ways of working.
There are signs that this resistance to change is slowly fading, however. Josh Lee Kok Thong, himself a millennial, says a new generation of lawyers across Asia is coming to the table with quite different expectations from their predecessors.
‘The millennial generation is going to be key. We are going to hold key decision making roles in organisations, law firms or in-house departments in a few years’ time. Once that happens there will be a fundamental shift in thinking in terms of how legal services are going to be provided’.
Besides which, the writing is clearly on the wall. Technology will play an increasingly important role in how lawyers deliver their advice, whether lawyers like it or not. But more importantly, when it comes to the law, the medium is the message. As Mottershead notes:
‘At the moment, we see legal tech as a tool that assists us in doing things more efficiently, but over time, that will develop or will actually provide different ways of delivering legal services altogether. It will inform decision making processes and create the opportunity for additional or new revenue streams.’
At which point, even the most conservative of lawyers will see their interest piqued.
What have we learned since March 2020? For Amar Sundram, head of legal at RBS in India, it is that talk of lawyers being an uncreative species was greatly exaggerated.
‘We are now seven months into the pandemic and the main myths about lawyers have been broken. The myths that we are not adaptive, that we do not take risks, that we are averse to technology – they have all disappeared. Lawyers have found that, when faced with necessity, they can take to new tasks as well as any other professional group.’
Our survey of over 100 of the leading counsel across the Asia Pacific region showed that less than a fifth of legal teams (18%) felt their output was significantly affected by the pandemic, though the bulk of respondents (73%) had experienced some level of disruption.
For many legal teams, the pandemic was an unexpected experiment in working remotely. While over half of legal teams (59%) had a prescribed remote-working policy in place before the pandemic hit, and almost all (95%) felt such a policy was necessary, this was scant preparation for having the entire team work remotely for weeks at a time.
Marcus Clayton, general counsel and company secretary at leading Australian integrated construction materials producer Adelaide Brighton Cement (Adbri), reflects on the early days of lockdown:
‘With a very lean team to start with, working from home through COVID-19 and splitting the legal team into Team A and Team B made it much harder to produce the expected outcomes, [particularly as] demands increased. We were all to work longer and harder in difficult circumstances to achieve a lesser product than before.’
Many survey respondents pointed to a similar problem, noting that in the early days of lockdown they had been expected to meet more challenges with fewer resources. As one respondent, a legal director working at a large industrials company in Singapore, commented:
‘While demand for regular commercial advice has tailed off somewhat, we have had to contend with an increased number of requests for regulatory advice. At the same time, there has been a huge increase in the number of online meetings, with some of these taking up the entire day. Managing this challenge of growing demand under such unusual circumstances has been particularly difficult.’
Others pointed to the lack of connectivity in the legal team, and the difficulty of ‘discussion, deliberation and evaluation of the finer points of a matter’ while working remotely. Some felt that the organisational support for remote working was still lacking, with one Hong Kong-based general counsel at a consumer electronics company commenting:
‘A documented remote working policy has worked well for us. However, it will only work if home infrastructure allows employees to work remotely. It is more than simply providing a laptop. This has not been a problem with the lawyers in the legal team but has been a problem with support staff.’
The A and B Team
While talk among GCs has turned from “business resilience” to “business resurgence”, few expect their return to normal to be synonymous with a return to the office. Staff may be returning on a team by team rotation, but a growing number of companies have started to think about how they can operate a remote working policy as their default setting.
To do this successfully they will have to deal with the issue of cyber security. As Pulin Kumar, senior legal and compliance director at adidas India, notes:
‘In today’s environment a lot of things are system driven, and once you have a system driven environment then everything has to be connected. It is almost a given that for remote working to succeed information must be highly accessible. The data will flow to far more places and people, so the security checks in place need to be robust. This is a matter for IT teams, but it is also a matter for legal and compliance teams. Employees’ understanding of compliance has to be updated to account for the mass shift we are seeing toward working from home.’
Respondents to our survey echoed this, pointing out that remote working had exposed their companies to enhanced cyber security risks. Over a third (36%) felt the biggest risk came from loss or theft of confidential business information. As one GC commented, ‘Sensitive data and applications are now being accessed through non-secure networks. Businesses need to give this some more thought, and will likely have to invest more time, effort and money to strengthen their IT infrastructure.’
Of course, when it comes to new ways of working, not all legal work is created equal. Work involving insurance claims relating to physical infrastructure, anti-bribery and fraud investigations, or due diligence in the context of an M&A where virtual data rooms are required are all exponentially more difficult to do remotely. As Nancy Wei, associate legal director of Skechers China comments: ‘Remote working is really helpful non-litigation scenarios. For litigation issues, I tend to choose face to face meeting to discuss the facts of the case and collection of evidence.’
A pandemic in numbers
But perhaps we should not dwell on the negatives. One of the most surprising things about the lockdown has been the ability of many businesses to function as normal. Likewise, legal teams have managed to weather the storm successfully. Nearly a third (27%) of respondents to our survey felt their efficiency had improved, while a similar number (24%) said their output had in fact increased. Being on call 24 hours a day does have some advantages….
Another positive has been the invigorating effect remote working has had on legal teams. As Amba Prasad, vice president and head of legal services at Indian construction and engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro comments:
‘COVID-19 has shown that the remote working can be efficient despite the challenges of management and the interplay of work related to teams based in different locations. Scaling up our technological infrastructure in a timely manner aided this transition.’
Aside from helping the legal team find new ways to operate efficiently, he continues, the pandemic has had other benefits. ‘It has brought the team together in a manner that was never before seen. Caring and sharing between team members has really become an embedded practice.’
This much is clear from our survey. Fully 31% of those we spoke to said employees within the legal team were happier with their current out of office setup.
While most GCs felt remote work had been a positive thing for the legal team, there are questions of whether the same established structures can endure over the longer term. Bernard Tan, Asia Pacific managing counsel at Agilent Technologies, comments:
‘I don’t think there is an immediate negative impact to productivity as we have the necessary working culture, processes and technical infrastructure that enable work to continue on a remote basis. The concern is more about long term engagement issues and whether, as a legal team, we are able to continue to exert the necessary influence and engagement with internal clients if we work on a 100% remote basis perpetually.’
The solution to this ongoing question will likely involve increased spending on technological infrastructure and enhanced cyber security protocols, but it will equally depend on the approach taken by lawyers. As Nancy Wei concludes:
‘It is going to be a case of legal teams learning new and more flexible ways of doing things. We need to communicate more efficiently and effectively, especially when facing up to balancing business opportunity and risks. Trust among team members is going to be very important in facing up to this uncertain situation.’
With nearly three quarters (73%) of respondents saying the expect remote working to increase over the coming months, pressure on GCs to find ways of dealing with uncertainty is going to be with us looks set to become the new normal.
For GCs, technology is very much a love-hate relationship. We love using technology and are increasingly reliant on it, even though we hate to admit it. The pressure every business has been under to work remotely is showing us how much we rely on technology to operate, which was a trend that started long ago.
Within the legal function we are now using technology for everything from e-discovery to data mapping and analytics. Even beyond front-end legal work, we are using technology to update our insurance certification or take care of our invoicing and billing. Really, we could not operate as a function without this technology. The question, then, is not whether legal technology will become important – it is already essential to the way we operate – but how it will change what we do, and whether it will replace certain tasks. As far as I can see technology will not replace lawyers, but it will open up new ways of working and allow us to see things that were previously invisible.
Working within a rather lean legal team means that each person has to draw on whatever resources are available to maximise his or her benefit to the business. I am a certified data protection officer and sit as the designated privacy representative for the Asia region. I’m also a certified enterprise risk advisor, a certified business continuity manager, and have just sat the anti-bribery exams. Having that broad-based training is one way of maximising the range of matters I can cover. The other is using technology effectively.
I estimate that our use of technology allows each lawyer to double their workload, so this is not an inconsiderable benefit to the team. The other big benefit technology brings to our legal work is that it allows us to take a more systematic, joined-up approach to risk. The ability to search documents quickly and reliable is one of the best ways to identify and mitigate risk patterns in litigations, investigations, complaints and a many other areas.
This is a fast-moving area of legal tech and one where we really need to keep our eyes open. For example, investigations require detailed knowledge of the underlying facts, and increasingly sophisticated software is being developed all the time. As lawyers, we have to be very open-minded to the possibilities this software will unlock. We almost have to forget that we are lawyers for a moment and think of it as a data mapping task rather than a legal task.
To use legal tech effectively you cannot be afraid to fail. You have to explore new technologies, launch new programmes and initiatives, and start working in different ways, but you also have to know when to abandon software and strategies that are not effective. This requires a fundamental shift in thinking for most lawyers.
Open yourself to new ideas, trial new software and ways of completing legal tasks, but don’t be afraid to admit that something isn’t right for you. You have to be very careful, because not every technology will suit your use case. Try and test as much as possible before determining whether you can actually implement it for use in the long-term.
When it comes to identifying and procuring new technology, we are fortunate to have a supportive IT function. New software is purchased by IT at group level, but every decision follows close discussions with the various business units and support functions to make sure a product will do or can adapt to what we need it to do. My experience is that IT are always eager to explore new tech and are happy to find things that will make your life easier. Building that relationship with your IT people is essential to getting the right tools. But of course, as GC I also need to be involved in the process because only the front-line legal staff can truly stress-test a system.
While there have been big changes in the market for legal tech, most law firms remain quite conservative here and tend to focus on legal skill sets at the expense of other ways of working. However, there are signs of change. New business models that offer on-demand legal staff or a mix of outsourcing and technology-based solutions at competitive price points are becoming more accepted. Ten years ago no one thought it would work, particularly in this market. Now they are threatening the traditional firms. The lesson here is clear. Both in-house and private practice lawyers must be more receptive to new ways of defining products, markets and clients. Technology itself will not leave us behind, but our inability to adapt to its consequences certainly will.
As everyone knows, life after COVID-19 will not simple return to normal. New working arrangements are here to stay, and that means technology will become an increasingly important aspect of working life.
It’s fair to say that legal operations in Australia has evolved differently to the US, where businesses typically have much larger legal functions with many more lawyers in the organisation. There’s quite a sophisticated supporting structure around all of that which has effectively been brought into the legal operations umbrella. Australia is a little different.
The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) in Australia evolved out of a desire to bring together a group of legal staff working at some of the larger companies who had an interest in sharing things that we were learning through our operational improvement initiatives. That included technology but it also included other less tech-focused initiatives aimed at just improving our efficiency and service delivery.
CLOC, particularly in the US, also has quite an extensive array of online resources and online collaboration tools, including some active chat forums where people ask information about what’s happening, and seek insights from other CLOC members that might help them with particular problems that they’re facing or issues they need to solve. In the last year or so, CLOC has also put in place a law firm membership so that external legal service providers can share what they’re doing from an operational improvement perspective.
Sheldon Renkema, general legal manager, Wesfarmers
Legal operational enhancement can be a real challenge if you’re starting entirely from the ground up. One of the great things about CLOC is that you can very easily learn from what others are doing, so that you’re not reinventing the wheel. You are learning from others’ experiences, which makes it a really good forum for embarking on that journey, connecting with people who’ve been through similar experiences and being able to benefit from their experience of the things that have gone well or not gone well in that context.
It’s very difficult to actually objectively assess whether what legal tech providers are saying their product or service delivers is actually what it delivers. Being able to leverage the experience of people who have used those products and services to see what the actual output is helpful.
In my own in-house legal department, we were using an array of technology from the very basic, starting out at the bottom end in terms of core functionality, things like an internal matter management system, which generates data about what the team is doing and feeds into reporting on what we’re up to. We also have a document management system as well, that allows for ready storage of documents.
We’ve built a number of these tools, for example, a self-serve non-disclosure agreement tool that allows people in our businesses – without having contact with a lawyer – to be able to generate and execute a compliant confidentiality agreement. There’s also marketing review tools and a contract review tool that we’ve built and are continuing to evolve. Our objective is to identify processes that our lawyers would otherwise do that are not particularly complex and not particularly strategically significant. And where we can, making use of a tool so that can be done within the business in a user-friendly way that manages the risk.
Going forward, we are exploring the use of more sophisticated tools, particularly more advanced document review technology. The idea is to do an 80/20 review of incoming contracts so that against some key parameters that we’ve identified so that it really helps the lawyers to narrow down their focus on what’s really important in terms of those contract reviews.
We are fortunate in our business that we are relatively free to look at using technology ourselves, although there is some formality in the process. We have to ensure the software we are interested in complies with our data security frameworks, so everything needs to be reviewed by our cybersecurity team to make sure that it is compliant with our standards. The other – perhaps obvious – issue is fitting it into our budget. Aside from these issues, though, there is a fair bit of freedom for us to explore and test different offerings.
I would make the observation that lawyers increasingly need to be at least attuned to technologies and what they do. There’s an open argument as to whether lawyers need to be capable in skills like coding et cetera, my view is that this is probably not necessary but that they at least they need to be familiar with the technologies that are available, and need to be comfortable living with these.
Lawyers who are beginning their careers now are going to be looking at a very different way of practicing in 10 or 20 years’ time, and they need to be adaptable to that. Some have said that what is really important for lawyers is perhaps not so much blackletter expertise but around building empathy and their soft skills development. I think there’s certainly some wisdom in that.
Lawyers across the world like to talk about rubber stamping things, even though few who qualified in the last 15 years will have seen a rubber stamp let alone used one to certify a document. But, as we found out speaking to GCs across Asia Pacific for this special report, when a lawyer in that region talks about rubber stamping something, they often mean it literally.
‘Most documents I deal with require physically stamping,’ lamented one Indian GC. ‘Even if you want to automate some part of that process in the end you will need to get a stamp. That means a trip to another office, a taxi ride somewhere else in the city, a long wait in a queue. All to get that piece of paper stamped.’
India may be notoriously bureaucratic, but the problem was far from unique to that country. GCs from Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and even ultra-efficient Singapore told us of cultures rooted in face-to-face contact, deference to senior decision makers and established hierarchies. As a result, even that simplest of legal technologies, the electronic signature, had failed to take root.
The obstacles facing GCs who wanted to introduce technology felt unmovable. Until a pandemic hit. After nearly a year of lockdown, businesses across Asia have embraced new ways of working.
To understand just how much lawyers have adapted to tech in these strange times, GC magazine teamed up with World Services Group to survey over 100 of Asia Pacific’s leading general counsel. We asked them about everything from the impact of Covid-19 on the legal team’s efficiency to their use of AI, how they find the right software (and the money to buy it), and their expectations of outside counsel when it comes to technology.
We found evidence of a region that is almost uniformly embracing technology, a region where even the most entrenched cultural habits may be coming to an end. But let us not get carried away.
Any discussion of how GCs in the Asia Pacific region are using legal tech is liable to fall into the trap of focusing on culture first. Certainly, this special edition shows much evidence of country-specific traits that are restricting or encouraging the use of technology, but it also shows that GCs the world over are facing the same issues when it comes to technology.
Broadly, there are three steps involved in the acquisition of legal tech, all of which are things lawyers have historically struggled with: Knowing what’s out there; understanding and benchmarking the capabilities vs the cost, and convincing the business that it is going to save time and money. Until GCs get to grips with these procurement-driven approaches to buying technology their successes in finding suitable platforms is likely to remain limited.
On behalf of all of World Services Group, I am delighted to welcome you to the third edition of our GC special reports, looking at the importance and impact of technology on the legal profession.
This issue of the report is indeed a timely one, as at no point in our professional lives has the profound effect of technology been more evident. Since the onset of the pandemic, private practice and in-house counsel alike have universally transitioned to new ways of working largely driven by technology, demonstrating on one hand the adaptability of the profession, while on the other, dispelling tired notions of lawyers as technological luddites.
As the legal leaders featured throughout the report illustrate, innovation – particularly as it pertains to technology – is apparent in every corner of the profession. Just as we saw in the first two editions, neither budget nor business size need to be obstacles to innovating, with much of the counsel-driven development originating from little more than an idea and an opportunity.
Yet as we celebrate the shared successes seen across the legal industry, we must remain cognizant that innovation is a journey on which we will never reach a final destination. And with evolution emerging from every corner, it would be all too easy to rest on our collective laurels instead of continuing to build on the progress made. So, while we look on at the innovators and their accomplishments detailed throughout the report, we should also consider what we can do to foster and facilitate the emergence of the next wave of visionaries, set to take the profession further still.
Here at World Services Group, we want to embody the change that we advocate for. As an organization, we have seen that investing in technology, talent and corporate sustainability best practices that foster social and economic development are essential elements for ongoing business success – all of which represent key commitments I have made for my tenure as Chairman in 2020-21. By taking a strategic approach to our proprietary digital platform, empowering emerging leaders across our network, as well as improving training and accessibility to technology for all our membership, World Services Group is committed to ensuring that we are properly prepared to capitalize on the growing wave of technological innovation, for the benefit of both our members and clients.
In closing, I’d like to thank all of those in the legal community who contributed their thoughts and insights as part of the research for this report. By sharing your own lived experiences along this journey, I have no doubt you will help to shape and inspire the coming generation of leaders and innovators, set to once again disrupt the idea of what it means to be a lawyer.
Legal technology is something we have been exploring long before COVID-19 arrived, but the current pandemic has certainly forced us to fast track projects that we had been planning for the future. I would not say that we are using sophisticated systems – in our market sector it is not necessary to be at the cutting edge – but we have found ourselves using much more technology.
At the beginning of this pandemic there were obstacles to overcome, because we just didn’t know what to expect. No one knew how long the ‘work from home’ situation would last, but I don’t think anyone expected it to last for so long.
As general counsel and compliance officer for the entire food group at Pilmico, I am essentially managing legal work throughout the region. This can be difficult, especially as I am dealing with a range of jurisdictions with different laws on a daily basis. There is no real legal or regulatory alignment across the ASEAN region, which is certainly an obstacle to introducing new tech-enabled processes.
Most legal tech innovations I have come across have originated in Singapore. This is of course partly the result of Singapore’s strong culture of innovation, and the generous funding available for such initiatives, but it also depends to some extent on the regulatory environment. For example, Singapore recognises e-signatures, while countries such as Indonesia do not. As such, a platform which is supposed to lighten the burden by implementing e-signatures is not much use to a business that has a pan-Asia Pacific footprint.
From an operational perspective, things can get even more tricky. Remote working has impacted our operations throughout the Asia Pacific region, which means we not only have to focus on tools that can help our employees at headquarters in Singapore, but for all our staff across various markets.
Over the past few months, technology-driven developments and initiatives designed to make working from home easier have been prioritised. We have rolled out a new console system within the team to help us manage legal files. This has been very useful in making sure we retain and track important documents. This system was initially going to be introduced in the second half of next year, but we fast-tracked the initiative to help assist the transition towards working from home.
The experience has helped me see that in many areas we were still working in a very traditional way. For example, I would review a Word document, send it via email to the other party for review before receiving a marked-up copy for further review. When you look at documents being reviewed in this way, you end up creating many drafts and different versions of one document.
Being forced to adopt new solutions has certainly shown me that it is not the only way to do things. Even something as simple as Google Docs can help solve this issue, but I am increasingly interested in exploring the more sophisticated solutions that are available, such as a one-stop-shop that assists with drafting, reviewing, signing and retaining documents, as well as assisting with contract templates.
The biggest impact technology has made during the lockdown is in terms of how we share information and knowledge. We are now using virtual meeting platforms on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day. I suppose that shows that, for many tasks, there is no substitute for personal contact. We still need to discuss and exchange ideas, but perhaps the way in which we deliver our services will continue to evolve. However, I would say that we now spend more time interacting with our colleagues outside Singapore than ever before. If anything, the inability to travel has brought the wider team closer together.
Legal innovation is not only about technology, but the way lawyers operate. Most lawyers used to see an in-house role as a way of having better work life balance – this has changed and so have the expectations around them. To be a legal innovator you need to be a solution provider. Technical expertise is a given, being a solution provider is the next step, and the final and more significant part of legal innovation is being a thought leader.
Even though Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) is a public funded university and a charity, we have leveraged our digital tools very significantly.
When I joined NTU two years ago we were getting contract approvals through email or manually by paper, with several signatories required at the executive committee level. We retooled Adobe Sign, our e-signing platform, to use it, in parallel to e-signing, as an approval workflow system. We were able to do this by using existing licenses, and the new process has been extremely successful and well received.
The lesson is that legal innovation doesn’t always mean spending a lot of money.
The second tool we implemented is Convene, a piece of board management software. We transformed our governance architecture by migrating, as of late 2019, our resolutions, meeting minutes, and corporate instrument documents to this platform. Previously, these documents were circulated by emails. This is still fairly novel for a lot of organisations, and possibly for universities which tend to be slower to adopt certain technologies. We wanted to demonstrate that we could move ahead despite this.
Greg Chew
In most organisations, if you need IT support you log a ticket, and someone will get back to you to say “got your ticket”. We realised we could leverage this system as a workflow tool, not only to track case assignment to, or workload of, our legal officers, but to better understand data analytics – the quantity and quality of the work we’re doing. For this we used a platform called ServiceNow, an enterprise workflow tool.
This system was not ordinarily meant for that purpose, the employees that use it are IT, housing and facilities, the construction team etc. but we leveraged on the platform and licences that were already there. We have now gone digital for legal support requests.
We also embarked on legal process outsourcing (LPO) to handle growing contract demands, which you might think would be based in Asia but is in fact based in Europe. Legal innovation is not confined to home locations, especially with our current global situation.
In future we will look to implement a chatbot for legal help, so questions like “How do I get my contract approved?” and “Where do I get a template for this NDA?” can be processed. NTU has about 10,000 staff at the University and is the number 47 ranked institution in the world according to recent rankings. We want robust systems and processes that match our research and academic standards and ambitions.
Legal tech challenges lawyers to add value beyond what they ordinarily do. The things we were spending a lot of administrative time on are now being absorbed by legal tech, so we really need to show the value that we add. In the context of new legal tech coming in, we would rather preserve headcount and leverage technology than grow headcount, but at the same time, we want to upskill team members so we don’t have to deal with rightsizing when the time comes. We can say we will invest more in technology instead of hiring more people and add skills we don’t have today.
As lawyers we can still be very traditional in our mindset; we see ourselves as subject matter experts and are typically conservative going into fields we don’t know. Some of the Singapore law firms are now realising there’s a gap in the market and have now started to set up companies as spin offs from their own law firms. They’re limiting those companies to legal tech, with set up of legal tech tools which they can offer to their clients.
But what we need to do as a profession is explore how we work in adjacent fields that are not necessarily related to our subject matter expertise. Over time automation and AI tools will get better, so the question is, what is the gap the lawyer has to fill? Those who are very specialised (like tax lawyers) will continue as before. But what does the other type of lawyer do? What’s different about them? I think they’re the ones who will define the future of lawyering.
