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Month: June 2018

TechLaw.Fest 2018 – Meeting Where It Matters

Reading time: 7 minutes

Written by Josh Lee | Edited by Amelia Chew

LawTech.Asia had the privilege of being a media partner for TechLaw.Fest 2018. The inaugural TechLaw.Fest, held from 4 to 6 April 2018, saw the convergence of more than 1,000 legal professionals, technologists, entrepreneurs and regulators to participate in critical conversations about the future of the legal community. This article shares some of the common themes that emerged across the three days of TechLaw.Fest, highlighting the state of legal technology in Singapore and situating its development in Southeast Asia and the world.

Keynote address by Mr Brad Smith (President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft) at the Law of Tech Conference, TechLaw.Fest 2018 (Photo credit: Singapore Academy of Law)

The state of law and technology in Singapore

In recent years, there has been a growing buzz around law and technology in Singapore. In his opening address at the Law of Tech Conference, Minister-in-Charge of the Smart Nation initiative Dr Vivian Balakrishnan highlighted seven major technology trends making a global impact today:

  1. Declining marginal cost of replicating, storing and transmitting information;
  2. Declining marginal cost of computing;
  3. Accelerated clock speed of technology;
  4. Wide deployment of sensors leading to an explosion of data;
  5. Increasing capacity to analyse data;
  6. Disruption caused by robotics; and
  7. Progress in artificial intelligence.

Minister Balakrishnan observed that these technological trends “interact and catalyse virtual cycles, feeding and accelerating one another”. The interaction and reinforcement of these trends have political and socio-economic ramifications, such as the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles that threaten to disrupt the fabric of society.

People: Andrew Arruda

Reading time: 3 minutes

Interviewed by Josh Lee | Edited by Samuel Lim

Andrew Arruda is the CEO and co-founder of ROSS Intelligence, the successful legal technology company that harnesses AI and natural language processing to enhance lawyers’ research capabilities on the ROSS research engine. Recognised as an inspiring legal mind in the field of AI, Andrew made the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2017. He recently visited Singapore to deliver the closing keynote speech at TechLaw.Fest 2018, a legal technology conference that brought together the best minds in law and technology.

LawTech.Asia, a media partner of TechLaw.Fest, is honoured to have Andrew share with us the traits of a good legal technologist and the future use of AI in the legal industry.

Cross Platform App Development for the Legal Tech industry

Reading time: 4 minutes

Guest Post By Wilson Foo Yu Kang | Edited by Jennifer Lim Wei Zhen & Josh Lee

Wilson is an Advocate & Solicitor of the Singapore Bar. He works at Trident Law Corporation. He is also a Cross Platform App Developer. He has developed the legal apps JusQuaere and Caselist.

What is cross-platform app development?

The term “cross platform” has been bandied about in a variety of ways, especially since the creation of the Java language which allowed programs to run on different types of devices and operating systems. In this article, cross platform app development will be used in the sense of writing a single software application which runs across multiple platforms. A platform can mean many things – it can mean hardware architecture (e.g. ARM, the usual chips used in phones as compared to AMD64/x64, the usual chips used in desktops and laptops), operating system (Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac, Linux), type of deployment (native versus web) etc. I will generally be focusing on the applications which can run across the web/native divide as well as multiple device type (i.e. iPhone, Android and desktop), and how it impacts the legal tech landscape.

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