It’s clear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact all professions in some way or another in the coming years. One profession already experimenting with AI to make itself more efficient is the legal industry.
As Prime Minister Lawrence Wong mentioned at Budget 2026, AI is “already reshaping many forms of white-collar and cognitive work”. Singapore’s legal profession is experiencing a transformation that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. Lawyers are now using AI to draft contracts, research case law, and even prepare for court appearances, all of which are changing how legal work gets done.
AI tools are also already operating in Singapore’s courtrooms, law schools, and law firms today. For anyone considering a legal career, already practising law, or simply curious about how AI is reshaping professional services, understanding what’s actually happening in Singapore’s legal sector matters.
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AI Is Already In The Courtroom
Since August 2023, the Small Claims Tribunals have been using Harvey AI – a generative AI programme built specifically for the law industry – to handle approximately 10,000 cases annually. According to Justice Goh Yihan, the goal is to help users answer legal queries, prepare their cases for hearings, and even get preliminary assessments of likely case outcomes.
The tribunals are also using Harvey to translate court correspondence into Chinese, Malay, and Tamil, making the justice system more accessible to Singaporeans who aren’t comfortable communicating in English. Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon noted that incorporating technology like this enhances access to justice and safeguards public trust in the system.
This matters because it’s not experimental or theoretical but is being integrated into real, everyday cases involving real people. With AI assistance used daily, this is setting precedents for how technology can be incorporated more seamlessly, without sacrificing accuracy or fairness, into judicial processes.
Law Schools Are Training Students Differently
In August 2025, law students at NUS were among the first to use large language models (LLMs), such as GenAI-powered ScholAIstic, to practice cross-examination skills needed in courtroom settings. The AI can play different roles in a courtroom scenario, including judge and opposing counsel, while students act as defence counsel examining witnesses.
The system provides real-time feedback. If a student asks a leading question like “Are you guilty?”, the AI acting as judge will object and correct them. This kind of interactive, immediate feedback wasn’t practically available with traditional teaching methods. Previously, opportunities to practice with a professor or teaching assistant were limited to once or twice a semester.
The Singapore Academy of Law has developed three learning modules featuring AI avatars for training both soft skills and technical knowledge: Strategic Negotiation, Handling Difficult Witnesses, and Therapeutic Justice. Delphine Loo, Chief Legal Officer at the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL), noted that the Therapeutic Justice module is especially useful for family lawyers learning to “defuse tense family conflicts”.
What makes this significant is that junior lawyers can practice multiple times on their own schedule without needing to coordinate with supervisors or reveal their struggles to employers. Like how the advent of the Internet helped democratise access to information, AI is already helping to democratise access to high-quality training.
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Law Firms Are Adopting AI At Scale
Several of Singapore’s Big Four law firms, including Rajah & Tann and WongPartnership, have adopted Harvey AI to streamline tasks like contract drafting, document review and analysis, and summarising legal documents. The goal is to make legal work more efficient so that lawyers can focus on higher-value activities that generate more revenue.
Beyond Harvey, there’s GPT-Legal, a generative AI model specifically designed for Singapore’s unique legal landscape. It’s been trained on LawNet data, Singapore’s primary portal for legal research, so it understands the nuances of local law in ways that generic AI models don’t. The key application has been legal document summarisation.
According to Janet Chiew, Deputy Director of Incubation at IMDA, GPT-Legal reduces summary time from two days to approximately 10 minutes. Think about what that means financially. If a junior lawyer bills at $300 per hour and spends 16 hours over two days summarising a document, that’s $4,800 in billable time. With GPT-Legal, that same task takes perhaps 30 minutes of review time/double-checking after the AI does the heavy lifting.
Governance And Output Concerns
IMDA has implemented safeguards to address AI “hallucinations”, which can be common depending on the data and prompts being fed to models. The system flags parts of summaries that may be poorly substantiated and provides a “fact score” metric to help users understand summary reliability. This is important because it acknowledges AI’s current limitations while still extracting value from the technology.
The Ministry of Law is also developing guidelines for lawyers to use generative AI responsibly, addressing risks such as inaccurate responses and security and privacy concerns, especially if models store prompts and outputs for future training.
This matters because lawyers can’t fully delegate their professional responsibility to an AI system. If you rely on AI output, you remain ultimately responsible for it. Professional negligence claims will still succeed if you rely on hallucinated cases or incorrect legal analysis, regardless of whether it came from your own mistake or an AI error. In that sense, the scrutiny of AI output in the legal industry is likely to remain high in the future.
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What This Means For Legal Careers
Chief Justice Menon has been explicit about the implications, saying that AI tools have evolved rapidly and sometimes outperform lawyers at tasks like document summarisation and transcript analysis. He emphasised that young lawyers need to be aware of both AI’s capabilities and limitations and be equipped with the right skills to use it day to day.
There’s a concerning trend underneath all this innovation. Recent surveys conducted at the 2024 and 2025 mass call ceremonies showed that approximately 60% of newly-qualified lawyers planned to leave legal practice within the next five years. Commonly cited reasons included excessive workload, inadequate work-life balance, and mental well-being concerns.
Law Society president Professor Tan Cheng Han warned that AI will likely reduce demand for routine legal work typically undertaken by junior lawyers. This creates a paradox because AI promises to eliminate tedious work that burns out junior lawyers, but at the same time, that tedious work is how they traditionally learned the fundamentals of legal practice and built a pipeline of billable hours.
The proposed solution represents a shift in how lawyers are trained and compensated. Rather than billing by the hour for routine tasks, firms may need to move toward value-based fees and demonstrate expertise in effectively using AI tools. Junior lawyers will need to develop different skillsets earlier, focusing on judgment, strategy, and client relationship management rather than spending years doing grunt work like document reviews.
What Comes Next
In September 2025, IMDA and SAL launched an AI-powered search engine on LawNet 4.0 enabled by GPT-Legal Q&A. This represents a new phase in the transformation of legal research. More than 75% of Singapore’s private practice lawyers now benefit from a significantly shortened legal research journey, freeing up resources to focus on other aspects of case preparation.
Unlike traditional keyword searches that match exact terms, GPT-Legal Q&A understands the meaning behind queries by combining large language model technology with retrieval-augmented generation. It’s trained on Singapore’s legal context with vast amounts of authoritative data, including judgments, legislation, and legal texts.
For legal professionals, the message from Singapore’s Budget 2026 is that AI isn’t replacing lawyers en masse but rather, like any industry, lawyers who use AI effectively will outcompete those who don’t. The government is providing training support, tax incentives for firms adopting AI, and expanding access to tools precisely because it sees AI literacy as critical to maintaining Singapore’s position as a regional legal hub.
The transformation is happening fast, so whether you’re a law student deciding on specialisations, a junior lawyer wondering how your career will develop, or a senior partner deciding on technology investments, the time to engage with AI in legal practice is right now. The firms and individuals who figure out how to combine legal expertise with AI capabilities will define what the legal profession looks like in the next decade and beyond.
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