LawTech.Asia

Asia's Leading Law & Technology Review

An Interview with Professor David B. Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, Faculty Director of the Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School

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On 20th August 2023

In Access to Justice, Artificial Intelligence, Interviews, Law Firms, Lawyers, Legal Innovation, People, Policy

Reading time: 9 minutes

Written by Josh Lee Kok Thong

On 3 and 4 August 2023, the Singapore Academy of Law (“SAL”), in conjunction with the Singapore Management University (“SMU”), organized a conference titled “The Next Frontier in Lawyering: From ESG to GPT”. The conference provided participants with an overview of latest trends in the legal industry, and how these trends posed opportunities and challenges for lawyers and legal professionals. Held at the SMU Yong Pung How School of Law (“SMUYPHSOL”), the conference saw hundreds of attendees learn from global and local legal industry leaders about cutting-edge developments in the legal industry.

One of these global leaders and giants was Professor David B. Wilkins. As Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, and Faculty Director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, Professor Wilkins is a prominent thought leader and speaker on the future of the legal profession, disruptive innovation, and legal industry leadership. He has written over 80 articles on the legal profession in leading scholarly journals and the popular press, and teaches several courses at Harvard Law School such as The Legal Profession, and Challenges of a General Counsel. 

At the conference, Professor Wilkins delivered a keynote address titled “From “Law’s Empire” to “Integrated Solutions”: How Globalization, Technology, and Organizational Change Are Opening “New Frontiers” for Lawyers, Clients and Society”. His address covered how law is becoming a more collaborative enterprise (with other knowledge domains) in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. While law would remain a domain driven by human capital, Professor Wilkins also urged lawyers to learn how to work with and understand technology. At the conference, Professor Wilkins also moderated a discussion on “Technology and the Legal Profession”, which explored how new technologies are transforming how lawyers work and interact with clients. 

Following his keynote address, LawTech.Asia (“LTA”) had the valuable opportunity of chatting with Professor Wilkins on his views on the opportunities and impact of technology on the legal industry, the training of future lawyers, how Singapore could strengthen its legal innovation ecosystem, and how legal technology could be better oriented to serve the underserved and under-represented in society. The interview, which is set out below, has only been edited for readability and brevity. 

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Eugene, Jun Hong and Alexis: Are law schools preparing students for a tech-driven world? 

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On 13th August 2023

In Law Firms, Lawyers, Legal Innovation

Reading time: 7 minutes

Written by Eugene Yan, Yap Jun Hong and Alexis Chun | Edited by Josh Lee Kok Thong

Conversations from the 17th International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice, held in Singapore in July 2022

In July 2022, SMU Centre for Computational Law (“CCLAW“) hosted the 17th International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice (“SubTech2022”). The theme for this edition was “Training lawyers (and computers) in the age of Computational Law”, and it explored how legal education, legal practice, and society at large could be supported and improved with the use of technology. Unlike most traditional conferences, SubTech2022 followed an “unconference” format where attendees also had a say in the agenda. To facilitate this, multiple “Birds of a Feather” sessions were held throughout the day, each with its own topic statement which was contributed to by participants.

This article distills the conversations which took place during SubTech2022 on the question of “Are law schools preparing students for a tech-driven world?”

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Third ALITA Awards at TechLaw.Fest in Singapore on 21 – 22 September 2023

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On 26th July 2023

In Access to Justice, Events, Legal Hackers, Legal Innovation

Reading time: < 1 minute

Nominations for the 3rd ALITA Awards 2023 are now open, and the winners will once again be announced and presented at TechLawFest, Asia’s leading and tech conference. TechLaw.Fest 2023 will take place at Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre on 21 and 22 September 2023.

The ALITA Awards were launched by the Asia Pacific Legal Innovation & Technology Association to give voice and recognition to outstanding legal innovators across the Asia-Pacific legal technology and legal innovation ecosystem. 

This year, there will be 6 legal innovator categories, with a new award for outstanding in-house and operations innovators.  This will add to the existing awards for outstanding legal innovator law firm, solution provider and legal entrant organisations, as well as an outstanding individual and legal innovation / technology project for good. 

As in the past, the three finalists from each category selected by the esteemed panel of international judges will be featured at TechLawFest and will be eligible for the People’s Choice Award based on a popular online vote. 

Past nominations and winners have been legal innovators from across the region, including Australia, Hong Kong SAR, India and Singapore.

Nominations close at midnight on 25 August 2023 (GMT+8). For more details on the ALITA Awards and the nomination form, please visit: https://alita.legal/alita-awards-2023.

For more information (including sponsorship opportunities), please contact ALITA Co-chairs:

This article was adapted from a press release provided by the Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association.

Victoria Phua: Attributing electronic personhood only for strong AI? 

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On 30th June 2023

In Artificial Intelligence, Policy, Regulations

Reading time: 16 minutes

Written by Victoria Rui-Qi Phua | Edited by Josh Lee Kok Thong

We’re all law and tech scholars now, says every law and tech sceptic. That is only half-right. Law and technology is about law, but it is also about technology. This is not obvious in many so-called law and technology pieces which tend to focus exclusively on the law. No doubt this draws on what Judge Easterbrook famously said about three decades ago, to paraphrase: “lawyers will never fully understand tech so we might as well not try”.

In open defiance of this narrative, LawTech.Asia is proud to announce a collaboration with the Singapore Management University Yong Pung How School of Law’s LAW4032 Law and Technology class. This collaborative special series is a collection featuring selected essays from students of the class. Ranging across a broad range of technology law and policy topics, the collaboration is aimed at encouraging law students to think about where the law is and what it should be vis-a-vis technology.

This piece, written by Victoria Phua, puts forward an argument for attributing electronic personhood status for “strong AI”. According to her, algorithms trained by machine learning are increasingly performing or assisting with tasks previously exclusive to humans. As these systems provide decision making rather than mere support, the emergence of strong AI has raised new legal and ethical issues, which cannot be satisfactorily addressed by existing solutions. The ‘Mere Tools’ approach regards algorithms as ‘mere tools’ but does not address active contracting mechanisms. The ‘Agency’ approach treats AI systems as electronic agents but fails to deal with legal personality and consent issues in agency. The ‘Legal Person’ approach goes further to treat AI systems as legal persons but has drawn criticism for having no morality nor intent. To address the legal personality in strong AI, Victoria proposes to extend the fiction and concession theories of corporate personality to create a ‘quasi-person’ or ‘electronic person’. This is more satisfactory as it allows for a fairer allocation of risks and responsibilities among contracting parties. It also holds autonomous systems liable for their actions, thereby encouraging innovation. Further, it facilitates the allocation of damages. Last, it embodies the core philosophy of human-centricity.

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Where is legal technology in Singapore today?

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On 27th April 2023

In Law Firms, Lawyers, Legal Innovation, Legal Technology in Singapore

Reading time: 13 minutes

Written by Josh Lee Kok Thong

Introduction

Where is legal technology in Singapore today? For many who have followed the development of the sector here, this question is more than merely factual. At its core, it is a reflection on the past, present and future of Singapore’s legal technology sector, and traces the development of Singapore’s legal technology landscape.

This article explores this evolutionary arc. First, it describes the development of the legal technology industry from 2016 to 2020, which saw significant and growing interest, demand and dynamism in the use of technology in Singapore’s legal industry. Second, it examines what the legal technology sector looks like today, and two key phenomena that have defined this era: the COVID-19 pandemic and growing institutionalisation of the sector. Third, it looks at the implications of the present state of Singapore’s legal technology industry. Fourth, it suggests areas that Singapore’s legal technology sector can explore to infuse greater interest, innovation and investment into the ecosystem. 

This article also hopes to highlight the two key groups of players to Singapore’s legal technology landscape: established institutional actors, such as the government and its various agencies, as well as large law firms and legal technology companies; and “ground-up actors”: local legal technology start-ups, informal and/or non-profit bodies set up by legal technology enthusiasts, student groups in law schools, global legal technology movements, and more. Over the course of the article, it is submitted that greater collaboration between both sets of players is encouraged for the success of Singapore’s legal technology ecosystem. For Singapore’s legal technology sector to reach its renaissance, such collaboration needs to be carefully developed and nurtured.

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