Asia's Leading Law & Technology Review

Category: Legal Innovation Page 12 of 22

Legal Technology and its potential to improve client collaboration

Reading time: 5 minutes

Guest Post By Marc May | Edited by Josh Lee

“Legal technology” (or “legal tech“) a term that is incredibly broad and encompasses any technology or software that is able to improve the provision of legal services. Many a time, the mention of legal tech brings to the minds of lawyers technology that bring internal process improvements, such as improved legal research, contract review or drafting. 

However, aside from the promise that legal technology can free up time for lawyers so that they are able to build better client relationships, there are also innovative ways legal technology can help lawyers directly to become more collaborative with clients. Here are two ways legal technology could do so:

  1. Collaborative drafting; and
  2. Automation-as-a-service.

LawTech.Asia’s Response to Public Consultation on Model AI Governance Framework

Reading time: 2 minutes

On 23 January 2019, the Personal Data Protection Commission (i.e. the Info-comm Media Development Authority) (the “PDPC”) published its Model Artificial Intelligence Governance Framework (“Model Framework”). The PDPC also launched a public consultation to receive feedback on the Model Framework.

As an organisation committed to thought leadership in law and technology (with AI regulation a key area of focus), LawTech.Asia produced a response to the public consultation on 24 June 2019.

LawTech.Asia’s response comprised the following two sections:

  1. A framework tailored for the implementation of the Model Framework to the legal technology sectors. Tapping on LawTech.Asia’s familiarity with the legal and legal technology sectors, LawTech.Asia produced a customised framework tailored specifically for the implementation of the Model Framework to the legal technology industry. We hope that this customised framework may shed some light in allowing legal technology firms deploying AI to have greater guidance in aligning their practices with some of the implementation guidelines set out in the Model Framework.
  2. Comments and feedback on each specific section covered by the Model Framework. These sections are, namely: the overall principles set out in the Model Framework, internal governance measures, determination of the AI decision-making model, operations management, and customer relations management. Tying our comments together is the thread that the Model Framework could go further in elaborating on some of the guidelines that it had set out, as well as to set out more specifically the ends that the Model Framework is targeted at achieving.

Our response may be downloaded for reference here:

In closing, we emphasise that the views set out within our response are wholly independent. They do not represent the views of any other organisation save for LawTech.Asia.

LawTech.Asia is also grateful to our partner and friend, Ms Shazade Jameson from the World Data Project, for her guidance and assistance in the preparation of our response.

The LawTech.Asia Team

Disruptive Legal Technologies – Is Ethics Catching Up?

Reading time: 6 minutes

Written by Alvin Chen and Stella Chen (Law Society of Singapore)

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in the August 2018 issue of the Singapore Law Gazette, the official publication of the Law Society of Singapore. Reproduced with permission.

In December 2017, DeepMind, a leading AI company, sent ripples through the AI world when it announced that it had developed a computer program (known as “AlphaGoZero” or “AlphaZero”) which learned the rules of three games – chess, Shogi and Go – from scratch and defeated a world-champion computer program in each game within 24 hours of self-learning.1 What was remarkable about DeepMind’s achievement was the program’s “tabula rasa” or clean slate approach which did not refer to any games played by human players or other “domain knowledge”.2 Yet, DeepMind’s program was able to develop an unconventional and some say, uncanny,3 methodology in surpassing current computer understanding of how to play the three games.

Referring to an earlier version of DeepMind’s program (“AlphaGo”) which defeated the (human) world champion in Go in 2016, the legal futurist Richard Susskind considers such innovative technologies to be “disruptive”. In his international bestseller Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (“Tomorrow’s Lawyers“)Susskind defined “disruptive” as something that would “fundamentally challenge and change conventional habits”.4

E-Discovery: Artificial Intelligence & Predictive Coding – Discovering the Way Forward

Reading time: 5 minutes

Written by Emily Tan | Edited by Jennifer Lim Wei Zhen, Josh Lee, Maryam Salehijam (Resolve Disputes Online)

Introduction

Cases turn on their facts. Lawyers depend on both the law and the specific circumstances of their client’s case to make a convincing argument for their client. This makes the discovery process, where the available information is sifted through to identify relevant evidence, a crucial step in any case.  

However, discovery is by its nature a slow and laborious process. Countless hours are spent digging through documents, emails and other such sources, searching for the key factors which may make or break a case. This “time-drain” has been exacerbated by the digitalisation of work, which has exponentially increased the volume of documents that lawyers have to analyse. In addition, it is typically the junior lawyers who are delegated to do the discovery task — which explains the television stereotype of young lawyers poring over cartons and cartons of documents late into the night. 

LawTech.Asia – Internship Portal

Reading time: < 1 minute

As part of our plans to help the development of talent in Singapore’s legal tech scene, LawTech.Asia is proud and honoured to announce the opening pilot of our very own Internship Portal.

The Internship Portal puts together internship opportunities available in firms and companies in the legal tech space. As a natural extension of our core product, the Portal provides a convenient entry point for students, lawyers and those interested in legal technology to quickly find avenues to develop their interests quickly and easily.

If you have been interested to explore legal technology for some time but are not sure which companies are offering internship positions, then this Portal is for you!

We will continue to develop the Portal together with our partner firms and stakeholders. In this regard, we’d like to sincerely thank Asia Law Network, the Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP), INTELLLEX, Legalese, Lex Quanta, and Rajah & Tann Technologies for partnering us in making this Portal possible.

The Internship Portal can be found here. If you are interested to find out how to have your legal tech company listed in the Portal, feel free to reach out to us through our Contact Us page.

Page 12 of 22

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén