Brunch :Legaltech and the law: How tech will change the practice
LEGALTECH AND THE LAW.Participants at a workshop organised by Future Law Innovation Programme , which aims to assist law firms in integrating baseline technology into their processes, encourage exchange of ideas between the tech and legal sectors, and develop Singapore's legaltech ecosystem."In the case of smaller to medium-sized firms, the Law Society can, and will, step in to play a critical role to support these firms.
Others, like law lecturer Jerrold Soh, saw the window early on - he established a legal analytics startup with college classmates in 2016 even before he graduated from law school.Enabled by technology, alternative legal service providers - especially the Big Four accounting firms - are giving lawyers a run for their money.
Apart from enabling competition from ALSPs, technology is also threatening to upend junior lawyers' work as well as law firm structures and fee models. Another industry body, the Law Society, launched subsidy schemes Tech Start for Law in conjunction with the Ministry of Law and Spring Singapore , as well as SmartLaw Assist to help defray costs of adopting productivity and capability development solutions in 2017.
From an industry review conducted in 2016, the Law Society found"tech-related innovation to be lacking with constraints in time and other resources cited as barriers". Further, there was"little business acumen in wanting to leverage technology as an enabler to further improve competitiveness". Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, who has made repeated clarion calls for lawyers to embrace technology, noted in one of his speeches last year that technology may not come cheap but it is necessary. He said:"While investment may be expensive... it will be integral to future-proofing our profession..."CJ Menon in that same speech gave anecdotes of how new technology was received by the legal fraternity in the past.
"The upshot is that law firms can expect to feel the pressure to operate on a leaner basis and they should start rethinking their traditional billing and cost structures as technology obviates certain forms of legal work, and in many other ways alters the face of legal practice," he said. "A year ago, I couldn't even file a writ," the 67-year-old tells BT. He proudly shows BT his Google Calendar, which he only recently took up after being introduced to it by a young paralegal. So apprehensive was he at the start that when he first started using the digital calendar, he held on to a physical diary as backup. Mr Kumar has heard of the capabilities of artificial intelligence and is raring to give it a try.
Join them if you can't beat them. As Mr Soh tells BT:"My personal 'coping' strategy was to join the technology movement, as I had been tinkering with code even before joining law school. He sees the promise of legaltech primarily in lowering the transaction costs of justice. Lower costs lead not only to more efficiency in existing transactions but, more importantly, allows more people to access legal and court services.
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