Law is a calling and a public institution, not just a technical craft: Opinion

I refer to The Business Times’ article “Budget 2026: Why Singapore’s white-collar AI training drive is starting with law and accounting” (Feb 16, 2026) and The Straits Times’ article “As AI takes on legal work, what happens to the prestige of being a lawyer?” (Feb 18, 2026).

The latter raises timely questions, but it places too much weight on prestige as the lens through which the legal profession’s future is assessed.

Prestige has always been a by-product of legal practice, not its purpose. To focus so heavily on whether law retains its aura of difficulty or exclusivity risks mistaking a social signal for the substance of professional value.

The true question is not whether legal work still looks hard from the outside, but whether it continues to serve those who rely on it.

Much of what artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts are tasks that were labour-intensive rather than intrinsically valuable, as the first article notes. Routine drafting, document review and other forms of grunt work were never ends in themselves; they mattered only insofar as they supported sound judgment and fair outcomes.

If technology reduces inefficiency and opacity, that should be celebrated as progress, not a threat to professional standing.

What is largely missing from the discussion is the role of empathy and service. Law is a calling and a public institution, not just a technical craft or a profession. It is practised in moments of vulnerability, when livelihoods, families, liberty or survival are at stake. The ability to listen, understand context, and respond with judgment that is not only technically correct but also humanly appropriate remains fundamental to good lawyering and cannot be automated.

Pro bono work and community practice further illustrate the limits of a prestige-based narrative. Such work rarely confers status or economic reward, yet it is where the profession most clearly earns public trust. If AI creates efficiencies, the real test is whether those gains expand access to justice and reduce barriers for those users who are least able to navigate the legal system.

If the legal profession is to reassess itself in the light of AI, it should do so by moving away from perceived notions of prestige and towards a clearer articulation of its public role.

Any profession that measures itself by how admired it is risks irrelevance. One that grounds its value in responsibility, empathy and service does not need prestige to justify its place.

Debby Lim Senior partner, Dentons Rodyk and Davidson LLP

Source: The Business Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.

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