Media Release: Bringing together different stakeholders key to legal tech innovation, say panellists

Media Release

BRINGING TOGETHER DIFFERENT STAKEHOLDERS KEY TO LEGAL TECH INNOVATION, SAY PANELLISTS AT SAL’s FLIP EVENT

Singapore, 11 August 2017 – Creating a winning environment for the legal industry to thrive in an age of technology disruption depends very much on Singapore’s ability to bring different stakeholders together to collaborate and innovate, participants at a panel discussion organised by the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) said.

“Singapore is in a unique position to move ahead of other jurisdictions including the United States where stakeholders tend to have conflicting agendas. There is an opportunity to move ahead of complex jurisdictions like the US...if we seize this opportunity to work together, not to compete among ourselves, but to create something that is bigger than this island, for Asia, then I think there is an interesting opportunity to build on the existing base of legal services for the future,” said Hugh Mason, CEO and Co-Founder at JFDI Asia.

Lam Chee Kin, Group Head of Compliance at DBS Bank Ltd, agreed. “I have a very firm and passionate belief that the future of legal services depends on our ability to engineer a sustainable ecosystem. All the players are here and can easily come to the same table to work out the issues; lawyers with their clients, engineers, entrepreneurs, universities, venture capitalists, end users; we can engage them in conversations and if need be include the public sector. All these tee up to make good ingredients to create a winning environment for the future of legal services in Singapore.” Both Mr Mason and Mr Lam were among five panellists who participated at the SAL’s Future Law Innovation Programme(FLIP) info-session and cocktails recently. Details of FLIP were recently announced by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon. FLIP is a two-year pilot programme by the SAL to drive legal innovation and help develop the model for the delivery of legal services in the future economy.

Another panellist Hans Zhong, formerly legal tech evangelist at Dragon Law, noted that the gap between Singapore and the US, the leader in legal technology, is not as wide as expected. He recalled: “I went to Silicon Valley to visit the start-ups there. And the reality is that we are not really too far behind. We hear stories about ROSS going to law firms, ready to take over (lawyers’) jobs but really the gap is still very, very large. A senior lawyer I met said (they) are not using legal technology because it’s not very good, doesn’t really do the job.”

Panellists concurred that creating an environment of innovation is key to the future of law and that technology should be seen as an enabler and not the focus. Innovation must be human-centric rather than merely technology driven, they said. Mr Lam shared his experience at DBS where instead of requiring his banking colleagues to refer to a whole slew of regulations and rules on capital markets and securities trading, he simplified them to 12 simple questions to make them friendly and usable for the non-lawyers. His advice: “Start with innovation, work on human-centred designs and then use technology to drive it.”

Mr Mason also emphasised the human aspect, and the focus on what clients want rather than what technology can do. “The most common reason for failure for start-ups is producing something that nobody wants,” he explained.

Sophie Mathur, Global Co-Head of Innovation at Linklaters, commented on the challenges of creating an environment for innovation in a law firm, describing it as akin to turning an ocean liner, primarily because of the way lawyers are trained. Lawyers are perfectionists trained to look for mistakes. “When you see a document, it’s the typos that jump out at you. Part of an innovative culture is to be unafraid of failure and not have that stigma attached to failure.”

She said Linklaters is working hard on “an ideas pathway” to promote the sharing of ideas and how they can be translated into solutions. “You need some method to the madness, method to the spontaneity, the hard part is doing that in a way that is not micromanaging but enabling.”

RedMart, Singapore’s leading online supermarket, has little choice but to innovate as it was operating on a shoe-string start-up budget. Its legal team was comprised only of its General Counsel, Christopher Y. Chan, for the first few years. However, now with his Junior Legal Counsel, Ryan Tan, they made sure they familiarised themselves with all aspects of the operations so that they could produce a “triage sheet of risk factors” that prioritised different risks to the business.

Mr Chan noted that successful disruptors like Uber, Grab, and Airbnb were prepared to challenge existing rules especially since there isn’t a rule book that covers these types of e-commerce. He cited the example of how RedMart had to appeal to the Government to allow 24-hour delivery of alcohol to private residences.

“In a sense, this is how innovation happens. You have a problem, you try to solve it. In the Silicon Valley, everyone is hustling and hungry. These two things force innovation, not waiting for things to change on their own. It's great to see so many people in Singapore chasing this," Mr Chan said.

The FLIP info-session was attended by some 120 invited guests comprising lawyers, legal tech entrepreneurs, tech investors and government officials. In his welcome speech, the Honourable Justice Lee Seiu Kin, who chairs SAL’s Legal Technology Cluster, said it was important for the legal sector to reinvent itself. Disruption, he added, was fuelled not only by the possibilities brought about by technology but also by increasing demands and expectations of users of legal services in the digital age.

Justice Lee said: “FLIP aims not only to help our law firms ride the wave of digital disruption, it also aims to put Singapore on the map for ‘future law’ by catalysing a legal tech ecosystem involving entrepreneurs, innovators, lawyers, engineers and investors, to create legal products and services for the future economy with global commercial potential.

“It is our hope that the solutions emerging from FLIP in areas like Compliance Tech, Regulatory Tech and Smart Contracts, will be of value not only to the legal sector but also to related sectors like FinTech and the insurance industry.”

FLIP has three components namely: a co-working space with shared services and facilities, a virtual community platform (VCP), and an accelerator programme to groom promising legal tech start-ups and to incubate new business models or services.

The co-working space, The Legal Innovation Lab@Collision 8, opposite the Supreme Court, will help participating law firms free up resources and bandwidth so that they can focus on innovation and grow new revenue streams. It will be officially launched towards the end of the year.

SAL’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer Paul Neo said SAL has to-date received more than 20 expressions of interest from tech-enabled law firms and legal tech start-ups to participate in FLIP.

“Our target is to attract 40 participants to share this co-sharing workplace and together through collaborative efforts, start to incubate new business models,” he added.

About Singapore Academy of Law

The Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) is a promotion and development agency for Singapore’s legal industry. Our vision is to make Singapore the legal hub of Asia.

SAL works with our stakeholders to set new precedents of excellence in Singapore law through developing thought leadership, world class infrastructure and legal solutions. Our mandates are to build up the intellectual capital of the legal profession by enhancing legal knowledge, raise the international profile of Singapore law, promote Singapore as a centre for dispute resolution, and improve the standards and efficiency of legal practice through continuing professional development and the use of technology.

As a body established by statute, SAL also undertakes statutory functions such as stakeholding services and appointment of Senior Counsel, Commissioners for Oaths and Notaries Public.

SAL is led by a Senate headed by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, and comprising the Attorney-General, the Supreme Court Bench and key leaders of the various branches of the legal profession. It has more than 12,000 members, including the Bench, all persons who are called as advocates and solicitors of the Supreme Court (i.e. the Bar) or appointed as Legal Service Officers, corporate counsel, faculty members of the three local law schools (i.e. the National University of Singapore, the Singapore Management University and the Singapore University of Social Sciences) and foreign lawyers in Singapore.

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