Supported by: Lenon Ong, Utsav Rakshit, Benjamin Peck, Ong Chin Ngee, Tristan Koh
“In a year when a certain pesky virus turned the world upside down, how can a conference engage, encapsulate and elaborate upon all of the disruption seen in one year?”
This must have been the key question on the minds of the planners of TechLaw.Fest 2020, as they went about organising Asia’s largest law and technology conference. What followed was a signature conference held with a virtually (pun intended) uniquely signature.
In this article, LawTech.Asia will take our readers on a quick recap of TechLaw.Fest 2020, as we look forward to another exciting edition of TechLaw.Fest in 2021. LawTech.Asia is grateful for our ongoing strategic media partnership with the Singapore Academy of Law (“SAL”), and for the opportunity to be a media partner for TechLaw.Fest once again.
LawTech.Asia is proud to be a partner of the HKU LITE Lab’s LawTech and RegTech Sandbox Student Virtual Showcase 2021.
To be held on 3 May 2021 at 6pm HKT, the University of Hong Kong’s (“HKU“) Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Lab (“LITE Lab“) invites industry players and students to learn more about how future legal professionals are co-designing proof-of-concepts with legal, compliance and operations professionals to create self-help, triage and document automation solutions for real-world issues.
Legal and compliance departments are increasingly expected to “do more with less” and work “faster, cheaper, better”. As studies like LITE Lab’s report in conjunction with the Association of Corporate Counsel and Eversheds on Illuminating the New Normal: Asia Pacific Counsel in a Time of Unprecedented Change (2020) confirms, however, many in-house lawyers and compliance officers face limited budgets and limited time to learn and implement new tech platforms. Some, alas, are also tech averse.
LITE Lab launched its Lawtech & Regtech Sandbox to allow students to be part of the solution and at the same time develop hands-on experiential and interdisciplinary skills solving real world problems. LITE Lab has been contributing towards the talent development of Hong Kong’s international legal and financial hub status, and is working on innovative collaborations with Hong Kong-based teams of leading companies and financial institutions such as HSBC, FedEx Express, Goodman and Angelhub. LITE Lab’s students are also developing impactful access to justice lawtech tools to assist our ordinary and disadvantaged communities.
LITE Lab counts organisations such as Association of Corporate Counsel Hong Kong, Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, Fintech Association of Hong Kong, Asia Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (“ALITA“) and the Asian Academy of International Law as its supporting organisations, and it looks forward to viewers joining in on 3 May (Monday) via Zoom to witness the growth of the Lawtech and Regtech community in Hong Kong and beyond, together.
Interested participants should register using the button below.
LawTech.Asia is proud to be a partner of the HKU LITE Lab’s Access-to-Justice Lawtech Virtual Student Showcase.
To be held on 21 April 2021 at 6pm HKT, the University of Hong Kong’s (“HKU“) Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Lab (“LITE Lab“) cordially invites industry players and students to learn more about what it is doing to better serve under-resourced impactful organisations in Hong Kong, including co-designing and creating proof-of-concepts in collaboration with Hong Kong NGOs to improve access to justice (“A2J“).
In past years, the LITE Lab@HKU student team EC Bank addressing employment compensation were the Georgetown University Iron Tech Lawyer Invitational 2020 winners, and have since set up Litex as a natural language processing (“NLP“) lawtech startup. LITE Lab’s inaugural A2J lawtech virtual student showcase, with an esteemed panel of invited judges, will decide which of this year’s undergraduate student teams will represent HKU with their projects co-designed with impactful NGOs Equal Justice, Justice Centre and SoCO to assist victims of human trafficking, refugees/ asylum seekers and low income housing tenants utilising document automation, search engines and computer vision.
The A2J Lawtech Student Virtual Showcase will also feature other LITE Lab@HKU supported student initiatives, including A2J lawtech projects created both within and outside the LITE Lab course curriculum that assist with issues such as social and environmental impact measurement, unrepresented litigants, divorce court forms and wills.
The event counts organisations such as Asian Charity Services, PILNet, Pro Bono Hong Kong, the Asia Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (“ALITA“) and Legal Hackers Hong Kong as its supporting organisations, and welcomes participants to join in on 21 April 2021 (Wednesday) via Zoom as it seeks to grow the A2J Lawtech community in Hong Kong and beyond.
Interested participants should register using the button below.
Editor’s note: This article was first published by the Law Society of Singapore as part of its Legal Research and Development Colloquium 2020. It has been re-published with the permission of the Law Society of Singapore and the article’s authors. Slight adaptations and reformatting changes have been made for readability.
ABSTRACT
The advent of new technologies has presented (i) legal technological tools which assist lawyers in dispensing legal services (e.g. Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’)-powered eDiscovery, contract review and legal research tools); and (ii) technologies which shaped the type of legal services lawyers offer or adopt (e.g. smart contracts, online and decentralised dispute resolution).
This paper explores the scope and extent of ethical duties that should be imposed on practitioners in terms of (i) the duty to advise clients on new technologies that would facilitate the best running of their cases; (ii) the duty to advise clients on considering the existence of these new legal services and adopting them in their work products; and (iii) the duty to ensure that the tools used comply with the necessary ethical and professional standards.
Contracts are an essential part of any legal office. If your law practice drafts contracts, conducts due diligence or does compliance work on behalf of your clients, you likely process hundreds, if not thousands, of contracts per year.
If they lack contract management software, many legal offices will instead store their contracts on secured shared drives like Google or Sharepoint. Using a secured shared drive is a step up from storing contracts in filing cabinets, but it’s inefficient. Contracts remain hard to access by multiple people, and it’s cumbersome to assign management and authorship duties.
Contract management software helps eliminate value leaks and inefficiencies by providing centralized, organized access to all your firm’s contracts. The software can give your group the tools it needs to share contracts among coworkers securely, assign and manage assignments, analyze key terms, review contracts quickly and accurately, streamline and process results and keep track of important deadlines. It also frees up time for attorneys to do more strategic, high-value work and allows them to update contracts more regularly.
