AI-powered search engine to help Singapore lawyers with legal research

An artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine is expected to accelerate legal research and free up time for about 10,000 subscribers to legal research platform LawNet – or more than three-quarters of private lawyers working in Singapore.

Developed by the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) in collaboration with the Infocomm Media Development Authority, this new tool allows lawyers to ask legal research questions in natural language and receive contextual, relevant responses.

It is trained on Singapore’s legal context and supported by data such as judgments, Singapore Law Reports, legislation and books.

GPT-Legal Q&A, which has been rolled out on LawNet, was launched by Justice Kwek Mean Luck on the second day of the TechLaw.Fest on Sept 11 at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre.

The earlier GPT-Legal model launched in 2024 provided summaries of unreported court judgments, and has since been used to generate more than 15,000 of them.

“This is a game-changing feature. This new function enables lawyers to ask legal research questions in natural language and receive contextual, relevant responses, which are generated by AI grounded in LawNet’s content,” said Justice Kwek in a speech.

“It is designed to complement traditional keyword-based search by offering a more intuitive and responsive research experience.”

The previous search function required users to key in exact terms and use quotations marks to refine a search.

For example, lawyers who wanted to find out more about fraudulent representation in contract law would need to use “‘fraudulent misrepresentation’ AND ‘contract’” as the search term.

But with GPT-Legal Q&A, they can search by asking what the elements of fraudulent misrepresentation in contract law are, and the search engine will return results summarising the key information, as well as a list of citations.

“This is a significant undertaking. It involves extensive development and rigorous testing, to align technology to the demands of your work. As such, we will be rolling out this implementation in phases,” said Justice Kwek.

For a start, the feature is focused on delivering insights on contract law, as it is a fundamental area of law that underpins many specialised fields. 

The model will be improved to give insights into other significant areas of law like family law and criminal law.

Dr Ong Chen Hui, assistant chief executive of the BizTech group at IMDA, said that to guard against hallucinations, GPT-Legal Q&A is designed to refer only to the materials it is trained on.

Hallucinations, in this context, happen when an AI model generates incorrect or misleading information. If asked a question outside its scope, the AI model will say it cannot answer it.

Needing less time for legal research, lawyers will be able to focus on other aspects of case management.

Dr Ong said: “Many lawyers have dropped out of the profession because of things like long hours. So being more efficient will hopefully help keep lawyers in the profession.”

IMDA has also developed an agentic AI demonstrator for SAL to help corporate secretaries plan and execute events like annual general meetings (AGMs). 

An agentic AI can perform tasks without the need for human intervention.

The agentic AI for corporate secretarial work comes after the Corporate Service Providers Act came into force on June 9.

The law outlines stricter requirements to ensure companies uphold higher levels of transparency and regulatory compliance.

The AI agent can automate routine tasks like looking through the schedules of directors to find a time slot for AGMs, generating pre-AGM and post-AGM documents, and sending reminder e-mails for directors to sign documents before a deadline.

With the AI agent performing routine corporate secretarial duties autonomously, professionals will be freed to focus on higher-value advisory and strategic tasks.

These include advising boards on governance and regulatory changes to prevent costly non-compliance, and guiding companies on strategic moves like restructuring or initial public offerings.

Dr Ong said that the AI agent demonstrator will give assurance to corporate secretarial professionals that meetings run efficiently and in line with compliance requirements. “The demonstrator is a tangible example of how AI can address real-world challenges and elevate the way corporate governance is delivered.”

Separately, SAL also signed agreements on Sept 11 with four international content providers – LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, vLex and Legora – to provide global access to Singapore’s case law.

The partnerships will see the comprehensive collection of Singapore judgments, including the Singapore Law Reports, being made available on these sites.

Justice Kwek said: “This step will enable lawyers and legal researchers from other jurisdictions to more easily access and research Singapore cases. This will help raise the visibility and citation of Singapore cases, and further SAL’s mission of promoting Singapore law globally.”

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

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