TechLaw.Fest 2025 Quick Chats: Justice Kwek Mean Luck, High Court Judge, Supreme Court of Singapore

Written by Josh Lee Kok Thong

TechLaw.Fest 2025 (“TLF“) took place from 10–11 September 2025, bringing together participants from around the world to engage in leading-edge conversations at the intersection of law, technology, and business. This year, LawTech.Asia had the unique privilege of interviewing the Honourable Justice Kwek Mean Luck, High Court Judge of the Supreme Court of Singapore, Chair of Board of Directors of LawNet Technology Services (“LTS”), and Chair of the Board of Governors of the Singapore Judicial College (“SJC”). Justice Kwek also delivered a Welcome Address on Day 2 of TLF 2025.

Having served with distinction in various roles in public service, Justice Kwek reflected on several areas in this interview: how judges keep up with technological advancements (that may one day raise novel legal issues in the courts); his reflections on the hopes and aspirations of young legal professionals; how young legal professionals can prepare themselves for an AI-first future; and his advice to young legal professionals on building a meaningful and lasting career. 

LTA: Judge, thank you for speaking with us today. One of the key areas of law that you focus on in the Judiciary is intellectual property matters, which is being heavily shaped by developments in the AI space at the moment. While Singapore courts have yet to hear any substantive cases on IP-related matters in generative AI, could you give our readers a peak behind the veil to see how judges prepare for the rise of cases in such thorny areas? Are there, for instance, AI courses for judges, or discussions among judges on the legal and policy issues involved?

Justice Kwek: I would like to mention at the outset that I am speaking here in various capacities – as a Judge, as the Chair of the Board of Directors of LTS, and as Chair of the Board of Governors of the SJC. 

The Judiciary is very conscious about looking forward and anticipating issues that may arise. Technology – and AI – are some of these areas. As the Judiciary prepares itself, there are three things we do through the SJC. 

• First, building in our judges a sense of familiarity with technology;

• Second, providing our judges a sense of the emerging legal issues at the intersection of technology and the law; and

• Third, helping our judges consider how emerging technologies may affect the justice system and the operations of the court. For judges in Singapore, we have a responsibility not just in terms of adjudicative justice, but also in systemicjustice. Justices are on the front line, so we need to think and consider how various things – such as technological developments – may affect the justice system. 

The foundational technology course at the SJC tries to incorporate these three elements. There are three parts to the programme. The first part is a hands-on demonstration of technology. This allows judges to interact with the technology to get a sense of how it operates – after all, briefings are just not the same as getting a hands-on experience. The second part is where we identify emergent legal issues. There are two parts to this: one, how technology has come into our cases so far. Here, we want to show judges that this is how law and technology issues could arise. Two, what are the emerging legal issues to help judges become more aware of the different angles of the legal issues that may come before their court. The third part addresses systemic justice. The SJC brings together technology and legal practitioners into the same room, to share and discuss how they see the technology affecting the practice of the law and the justice system. This allows judges to look ahead and consider how emerging technologies may affect our work on systemic justice.

When it comes to AI, the SJC adopts this frame and applies it with greater depth. We hold briefings, discussions and seminars. We involve local and foreign academia, local and foreign experts from regulatory agencies, visiting practitioners and foreign judges. We also hold regular roundtables with foreign judiciaries. This allows judges to learn from how other jurisdictions are preparing themselves or addressing emerging issues. 

LTA: In your role as a Judge, you would have come across many young lawyers / legal professionals hoping to make their mark in the field. What have you taken away from their hopes and aspirations, and how do you think these hopes and aspirations dovetail with the ongoing evolution of the legal industry?

Justice Kwek: This issue is something that Judges very much keep an eye on. This is because the hopes and aspirations of young legal professionals are important for the growth of the legal profession. 

I’ve been struck in particular by young legal professionals whose hopes are to make a mark not just career-wise, or in terms of financial progress, but also to serve the wider community. That leaves a deeper impression because it is my sense that over the long life time of one’s career, what enables us to grow and expand is where people’s hopes and aspirations are tied to something larger: the concept of service, and of helping those around us with justice. That drives us to become more than what we are today.

When it comes to technology, many questions are being asked: Will technology change the nature of legal work? Will lawyers be out of jobs? These same questions are also being asked in many professions. In this respect, I would say that despite the uncertainty that may sometimes cloud the horizon, technological and industry changes will dovetail with the hopes and aspirations of those who see the legal profession as a place where they can contribute to the wider community. 

Let me give an example. One of the strong capabilities of AI legal tools is their ability to summarise legal research, conduct due diligence, or go through the morass of evidence and summarise it. In the past, when we went to court, you had around three bundles of documents. Today, we have terabytes of documents. The sheer amount of evidence makes it challenging to fully cover the ground. Technology, in this case, allows young lawyers to go beyond the scouring of evidence to aspire towards higher value-added tasks. In other words, technology provides young legal professionals with the space and capacity to move upwards to higher order issues. 

In the same way, the increasingly multi-disciplinary nature of legal practice will also allow our lawyers to be far more relevant and useful in helping clients resolve their issues. Increasingly, to be an effective lawyer, you cannot just know the law, you also need to know adjacent areas. For instance, one cannot be a technology lawyer without understanding technology. This trend towards multi-disciplinarity gives lawyers a better platform to learn and provide more helpful solutions to clients. 

These trends will enable those who want to make their mark, and who want to contribute to the community and their clients. 

(I)t is my sense that over the long life time of one’s career, what enables us to grow and expand is where people’s hopes and aspirations are tied to something larger: the concept of service, and of helping those around us with justice.

Justice Kwek Mean Luck, Supreme Court of Singapore

LTA: One of the key questions that young professionals stepping into the legal industry face is how technological advancements — specifically, the ubiquitous adoption of AI — will shape and impact their jobs and career trajectories. How would you suggest they approach thinking about this issue, and how can they better prepare themselves for an AI-first future?

Justice Kwek: One thing to consider as we consider technological change and how that might affect us, is understanding what will and will not change.

The nature of legal practice, and what we do in practice, will change because of technology. What will not change, however, is the need for depth of one’s craft. The honing of legal craft can only come through practice and time – it is not something you can achieve overnight. An AI tool may help you do a piece of legal research within a short span of time, but how you take the result and apply it to the facts still requires intentional practice. Thus, regardless how legal practice may shift due to technology, the need for deep legal craft remains. And the only way to achieve that is to have commitment towards honing the craft.

Mentorship, too, is very important. Regardless of what technology tools come out, one should always have good mentors to teach you about practice.

In addition, I would say that it is also important for us collectively, as a generation of lawyers, to think more deeply about how AI is affecting us. As AI is a very dynamic space, the more of us who are involved in serious and deep discussions on how it will affect us, the better informed we will be.  

For our young lawyers, how might they want to consider such issues? For me, I can share three lenses that I find helpful.

History

Let me start with the historical lens. By this, I mean looking at how over the course of history, societies have adapted to technology and how technology has affected society. AI is not the first technology that has arrived in our generation. For example, there was a time when we did not have the Internet. 

I will use the Internet as an example to draw out certain parameters of technological change: (a) ease of access; (b) speed of access; and (c) depth and range of technological capability.

There was a time, when to access the Internet, you needed modems, calling into billboards linked to landline phones. For those who know, you would recall hearing the familiar “bing” as you dialled in. Today, we can access the Internet wirelessly through our mobile phones. Bandwidth has improved tremendously, and so as the depth and range of information on the Internet. 

These same parameters apply to AI’s exponential growth. The speed and ease are there. You can access the capabilities of Large Language Models (“LLMs”) directly from apps on your phone or laptops. In time, LLM capabilities will become even more embedded, so that you are not even conscious that you are relying on generative AI. 

In considering technological changes over time, it is useful to bear in mind two types of change: adaptive change and hidden change.

Adaptive changes are changes that force us to adapt to new ways of doing things. The classic example pertains to the generation that did not use computers. In the past, bosses had to make corrections by physically annotating your work. Today, bosses make changes online through tracked changes. But for a generation that was not used to computers, it was an adaptive change. Or perhaps a more contemporary example: In LawNet, we recently introduced natural language queries for case law searches. At the same time, we announced that there remains the functionality to conduct Boolean searches. Why? Because there was a generation of people who had grown up doing Boolean searches and have honed it into an art. Since the role of LawNet is to assist in legal research across generations in Singapore, we must allow a suitable transition. Adaptive changes are thus changes we can see, and can deal with it better.

I am more concerned about hidden change. To give an example: one of my sons, when he was very young, went up to the television screen and started swiping it. When the content did not change, he turned to me and said, “Daddy, the TV is not working.” His generation grew up with iPads and touchscreens, so he thinks every screen should be a touchscreen. Hidden changes are difficult because they change how we operate and analyse things.

Today, AI is introducing hidden changes by removing many tasks we consider necessary in analytical thinking. You would have read about how people are no longer referring directly to sources on the Internet. It destroys the advertisement and information ecosystem. But if lawyers start to rely on AI to give a summary of the law, and if in time AI products become so user-friendly that we become fully reliant on AI to provide the summary, it raises a few worrying questions: Do we know the sources? Will the lack of engagement in analytical exercise required to arrive at a certain analysis hamper the next generation? If there is an algorithmic bias in the legal research tool, and if lawyers cite the research and judges accept it, could that result in unintended changes in societal norms over time? These are examples of hidden change we must be conscious of. 

In short, a historical lens makes us conscious of adaptive and hidden changes. Being conscious of the hidden changes, from generation to generation, will help us as a society, to move forward without losing the strengths of the past generations. Of course, we should not hold our hands off and not engage in technology. But we must engage it with our eyes open.

Geography

Another lens is the geographical lens. One aspect of this is where the US and China are heading in terms of their AI development. This area is very dynamic, so I will share a snapshot based on what I understand from speaking to people in the technology and venture capital industries.

From speaking to an AI company in the US, I sense two areas of great interest in the US: first, what they call the “mother-of-all-models” – drawing on global datasets to create a very powerful AI tool; and second, creating empathy in AI, with the hope that generative AI can move to emotive areas such as making good music or being good counsellors.

In China, the interest is very different. They are more practical-minded, and are looking at how AI can develop more powerful apps that can engage their consumers. It is not about creating the next ChatGPT, or developing a whole new field, but how can they adapt current LLMs to serve the needs of many different industries, particularly in China.

This is just a snapshot of what is going on in very dynamic fields in these countries. It does not mean that there is only development in such areas in these countries. But these anecdotal trends offer a view into the kind of changes that we may see in AI, from which we can consider how they may affect our work and industries.

Cross-industry

A third lens is the cross-industry lens. I have always found it helpful to look at what is happening in other industries. If you are doing HR – be it in head-hunting or recruitment – one of the most time-consuming tasks is going through thousands of CVs and try to find the candidate with the right fit. But, with AI, HR departments can now scan thousands of CVs. This allows HR professionals to focus on deciding who to take to the next step, enabling them to focus their energies on interacting with candidates and getting a sense of the right fit. Even there, AI is helping them, to record, transcribe and prepare psychological profiles based on academic research parameters and past precedents. Thus, AI too is going after what were previously seen as higher order tasks.

Another example I can raise is from the field of arts. At an exhibition I recently visited, two Singaporean artists did a multi-photography installation on the kinds of food consumed in different countries. To do this, they went to several countries with the same budget and see what foods people eat over generations on this budget. Because it was very society-focused, they decided to publish a book with societal data. They ran six LLMs at once, combined the answers of the LLMs into one set, and then got one of the LLMs sift out the best answers from amongst the various sets. So even in arts, people are using AI to push their art!

These are various lenses that help us to focus the issue. I have shared it in terms of lenses, because it is important for all of us to think about the issues that these lenses surface. I do not pretend to have all the answers, and I think it is important for all of us to engage in it so that we can have a discussion. We are all seeing different parts of a fast-moving society – the more of us are engaged in in-depth conversations, the better our legal profession will be. 

LTA: You have had a long and distinguished career in law and public service. What would your advice be to young legal professionals hoping to build a meaningful and lasting career in law and / or policy?

Justice Kwek: Over my career, I have drawn meaning not from what I’ve done but seeing what has happened around me. My advice to those looking to have a meaningful and purposeful career, would be to look outside of themselves and see what they can do for those around them.

I did not start out thinking that I wanted to be somewhere or achieve something. I have been blessed to have been in jobs that allowed me to look outwards, and that sense of a wider mission has been instrumental in driving me forward. What I do know, was that in whatever I did as I walk along the road of life, I wanted to be able to help people around breathe easier. That in turn has richly rewarded me. 

Meaning comes not from what we achieve from ourselves. At the end of our lives, we will look back and find meaning from what we have done for those around us. So in looking for purpose and meaning, find that meaning outside yourself – in service of those around you and wider community. 

In this regard, there is an old quote from Rabbi Hillel that, to me, captures this well: