As the digital age accelerates, the interplay between technology and law becomes increasingly complex and integral. In this exclusive cover story, Lex Witness sits down with Paul Neo, the dynamic Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of the Singapore Academy of Law, at the heart of TechLaw.Fest 2024. This prestigious event, renowned for its cutting-edge discourse, gathers the brightest minds at the intersection of law, technology and business.
Paul, a visionary in legal transformation, guides us through the festival’s robust agenda -focusing on AI governance, ethical implications, and the regulatory challenges reshaping legal landscapes globally. As legal practitioners, technologists, policymakers, and entrepreneurs converge to explore and debate these critical issues, TechLaw.Fest stands as a beacon of knowledge and innovation.
Join us as we delve into a deep discussion with Paul Neo about the transformative potential of technology in legal practice, the future of AI regulation, and the role of global collaboration in fostering legal innovation. Through this conversation, we aim to illuminate the pathways that are steering the legal profession into the future, ensuring it remains resilient, relevant, and revolutionary.
The Singapore Academy of Law is a public sector promotion and development agency for Singapore’s legal industry. It was founded by the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew to be the umbrella institution of all legal professionals in Singapore. By law, all individuals on the roll of advocates and solicitors of the Supreme Court of Singapore are members of SAL. Presently, it has over 17,000 members, including private practitioners, in-house legal counsel, the Singapore Judiciary, Legal Service, Public Defenders and law school faculty
SAL has a broad mandate, spanning continuing legal education to accredit and upskill our legal professionals, legal publication to promote Singapore’s jurisprudence, legal technology to supercharge legal practice, promoting alternative dispute resolution through mediation and conducting legal research to drive the harmonisation of laws to promote cross-border collaboration in trade and data privacy regulations.
As a judiciary-led organisation, SAL acts as a standards-bearer by producing high-quality research materials and content for the profession, both at home and beyond, to raise the profile of Singapore law and help members make sense of it in a clear and accessible manner. The content is developed by dedicated teams at Academy Publishing and the Asian Business Law Institute (ABLI), a subsidiary of SAL.
Almost all of SAL’s content is distributed through LawNet, a legal platform that includes a legal research module, an e-reading service and a regional portal with legal news and developments from the region, aptly titled LawNet Asian Insights.
Another important area of SAL’s work is related to its function as a custodian of trust-centric statutory services. For example, SAL operates the national Wills Registry and serves as the stakeholder for final payments to developers in property transactions. It is also Singapore’s competent authority for the Apostille Convention and appoints the commissioners for oaths and notaries public as part of its role in overseeing document authentication, notarisation and legalisation.
To deliver on its mandate, SAL organises several marquee events throughout the year including the annual TechLaw.Fest, which has grown to become Asia’s premier legal tech conference, and the upcoming Singapore International Dispute Resolution Conference (pls add some elaboration for this here).
SAL has been conducting overseas business missions for its members to gain exposure to key international legal jurisdictions and to exchange knowledge on issues of shared interests and concerns. For example, SAL organised a mission to Paris last year as part of the Singapore France Legal Symposium for our members to interact with their civil law counterparts and attune themselves to the changes and issues in that jurisdiction. These trips are also a valuable opportunity for members to meet with business leaders representing emerging sectors and economies, providing a good opportunity for members to grow their professional network.
This year, India is the first of several overseas destinations that SAL will bring its members to, with trips to the United Kingdom, ASEAN and China also planned. As the largest common law jurisdiction in the world, India has always been a key source of jurisprudence for Singapore and many of our statutes have their origins in Indian law like our Criminal Procedure Code.
Today, India has emerged as one of the global technology powerhouses and it has a young but very lively legal tech sector that some reports estimate as being worth over US$1 billion. We are excited by this and would like Indian legal tech companies to explore using Singapore as a springboard into the wider ASEAN and Asia-Pacific markets and also to partake of opportunities in our venture capital and investment scene.
Given our role in organising TechLaw. Fest, we also hope to attract Indian legal tech start-ups to grow their footprint in Singapore and ASEAN through the conference, which attracted delegates from 34 countries and regions last year.
Some were from as far away as Trinidad and Tobago, so there’s definitely a chance to meet a diverse group of potential customers and partners at this event.
We are very grateful to our partners, including the Supreme Court of India, Confederation of Indian Industry, Invest India, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the High Commission of India in Singapore and Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas for their support in making this business mission a success.
Our partners in the Singapore Government, including the High Commission of the Republic of Singapore in New Delhi, Ministry of Trade and Industry and Enterprise Singapore have also been of great help.
Attendees of this year’s TechLaw.Fest (11 – 12 September 2024) can expect a wide-ranging exploration of AI’s impact on law and technology. Notable topics include protecting creativity in the generative age and demystifying global AI regulation—these will tap on industry insights into copyright issues, intellectual property rights, and emerging regulatory frameworks.
Besides AI, we’ll also examine the intersection of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting in the digital realm, with sessions that explore the impact of ESG reporting on supply chains. Deep dives into innovative solutions to reduce digital technology’s environmental footprint and digital sustainability initiatives by businesses and governments will also broaden the breadth of discussions.
The conference’s global perspectives will be enriched with views from both civil and common law jurisdictions; the team is at work to include speakers from regions like Europe and Latin America, so that attendees can see how shifts in law and technology are playing out across the world.
As an event focussed on the duality of “law of tech, and tech of law”, TechLaw. Fest has always included an exhibition showcasing the latest in legal tech and providing delegates with the opportunity to immerse themselves in the technologies they may have heard about, but never quite experienced or understood. A recent example was the 2022 edition, which was themed around the metaverse – where participants donned VR headsets to attend panel discussions that were actually held in the metaverse. We hope to recreate that sense of wonder for the possibilities of tech at this year’s exhibition as well.
Dedicated networking events and spaces have also become a signature aspect of the conference, and these will steam ahead in 2024.
SAL’s Chief Executive, Mr Yeong Zee Kin, recently authored Technology Regulation in the Digital Economy, which offers a compelling look on the policies and regulations that keep the digital sphere going. Zee Kin is wellplaced to explore such topics, given his vast experience in the data and digital economy, including as a regulator (as Deputy Commissioner of the Personal Data Protection Commission, overseeing the administration and enforcement of Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act). It’s an informative and easy-toread guide that I would recommend. The title, along with all Academy Publishing titles, are available on SAL’s Academy Library (https://www.lawnet.com/library/ welcome), which is one of the few e-reading services dedicated to legal publications and titles.
For cutting-edge and practical research on the state of these matters in various Asian jurisdictions, I would point users to resources published by the Asian Business Law Institute (https://abli.asia/ publications/). These cover both civil and common law jurisdictions; for example, its research examining the treatment of cryptoassets as property under relevant laws in civil jurisdictions covers China, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, while its common law counterpart tackles the issue in India, Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia. This comparative approach will be a great resource for lawyers involved in cross-border matters and transactions.
New technologies and even new forms of working are having an impact on the training and development of young lawyers. Easy access to technology like generative AI has heightened client expectations of faster turn-arounds and also reduced the work traditionally used for training young lawyers – such as legal research and forensic skills. These were honed via manual tasks such as document review, but the automation of such tasks necessitate a re-think of where lawyers can add value.
At the same time, careless and undiscerning use and deployment of gen AI in the legal workplace can lead not only to compromised standards of practice but also breaches of professional ethics – potentially undermining the sacred trust upon which lawyers rely to serve their clients.
SAL recognises the urgency of training of both young and older lawyers to value-add effectively and safely in an AIpervasive legal workscape. To this end, it is adopting a lawyer-centric approach – i.e. one that is grounded in the view that tech, like Gen AI, are merely powerful augmentation tools whose appropriate use is context-sensitive and depends on the right conditions being in place. Upholding the lawyer as a trusted legal professional in service of the administration of justice is always paramount. Thus, while young lawyers should be up-skilled in AI augmentation, and those with supervisory responsibility should be equipped to lead an AIaugmented legal workforce, ALL lawyers should be trained in the limitations and risks of Gen AI and its ethical use, including in the necessary guardrails to observe.
A key initiative to be launched next year is the Junior Lawyers Professional Certification Programme (JLP), which aims to equip this group with practical skills for disputes or corporate practice, as well as impart people & management skills and reinforce principles of professional ethics. It’s geared towards preparing participants to tackle the reallife legal and ethical challenges they might face on the job. The course is open to participants from India as well. Such programmes will help young lawyers to rapidly develop the right skillsets to put them in good stead to become “hightouch” and not just “high-tech” legal professionals.
A course that regularly sees attendees from India is the one we run with renowned business school INSEAD. The SAL-INSEAD Legal SAL-INSEAD Legal Leadership Programme applies business school methodologies to address leadership challenges faced by legal professionals. With law practices increasingly being run like large businesses, leaders in law firms and legal departments must be able to manage challenges like cost pressures, growing competition and talent retention.
In 2023, SAL announced that we would operate and develop our services running on digital platforms through a new subsidiary, LawNet Technology Services (“LTS”). LTS, which became operational in April that year, is helmed by a team of technology professionals and governed by a board of directors who will provide expert guidance on IT governance, including but not limited to the procurement and development of IT projects. Key projects that the team at LTS is working on include a gen AI powered LawNet, the digitalisation of SAL’s trust-centric services and the Singapore Mediation Centre’s online dispute resolution platform. We hope to roll out updates to these at TechLaw.Fest this year.
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