New generative AI feature to help lawyers summarise court judgments from September

Singapore's legal resource database will soon launch a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help lawyers do their research more efficiently.

The feature, known as GPT-Legal, will be available on LawNet from September, announced Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon on Monday (Aug 19), at the first session of the annual mass-call ceremony to admit new lawyers.

The large language model tool was trained on legal data from LawNet’s repository of content, which includes court judgments, journals, academic articles and textbooks. It was co-developed by the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority.

For a start, the tool can provide summaries for the more than 15,000 court judgments, and can potentially be used to summarise vast quantities of other material, said Chief Justice Menon.

“Crucially, it will feature in-built trust and safety features to mitigate the risks that are thought to inhere in AI-generated summaries,” he added. These features include being able to pin an accuracy score for each judgment and to identify the corresponding paragraphs being referenced, so that users can quickly carry out cross-checks for accuracy.

Separately, SAL has partnered with Microsoft to soon launch two initiatives to help lawyers understand the basics of AI and its applications.

The first is an online course on generative AI to give lawyers a broad understanding of the technology, its applications and best practices for safe and effective use. The second initiative is a guide for lawyers on how to best engineer prompts to obtain better results when using AI tools.

Beyond these, AI can do much more for the legal service, said Chief Justice Menon. It can, for example, help with producing documents, conducting due diligence and drafting documents – areas “where significant progress has already been made”.

AI could soon even make assessments on the likely outcomes of litigated cases in some areas of law in Singapore. Already, legal analytics tools such as Lex Machina and Solomonic are being used in other jurisdictions.

In Singapore, the legal sector is exploring using an AI tool by legal tech startup Harvey to assist users in the Small Claims Tribunal, said the chief justice.

“In light of these developments, our profession urgently needs to consider and assess the implications that AI will have on the practice of law,” he said, and urged law firms to look into tapping such tools to improve service delivery to clients.

In his speech, Chief Justice Menon also shared initiatives to help junior lawyers with training and development.

In the area of mentorship, an ethics and professional standards committee has recommended designing a structured mentorship programme which law firms can adapt for their use.

The committee, chaired by Justice Valerie Thean and Senior Counsel Jimmy Yim, also recommended providing law firms with the resources to administer mentor training programmes.

“With these initiatives, it is hoped that more law firms will be able to establish their own structured mentorship programmes,” said Chief Justice Menon.

“These programmes will then complement the mentorship schemes that are externally run, and which aim to connect mentees with mentors from beyond their immediate workplace.”

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