SCOPE OF LEGAL TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION

SCOPE OF LEGAL TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION

Asia, a region known for some of the world’s most innovative technology companies and tech-savvy populations, has been surprisingly slow to adopt legal technology. But several Asian legal markets — Singapore, India, Japan, and even Mongolia — started to make headway in 2019. To remain competitive, it is imperative for law firms and lawyers to keep abreast of technological trends that are redefining the profession. The next “big thing” could have a huge impact on how the law is practiced.

While legal tech cannot replace lawyers, it can empower them, dramatically extending their reach and efficiency. As a result, there is increased focus being placed on thinking out of the box when it comes to legal services, and how to use existing and emerging technology innovatively to elevate current legal offerings. The Asia Pacific region, in particular, is solidifying its status as an incubator for legal innovation.

When we look at the regions comprising of the Asia Pacific, Australia has been one of the first regions to incorporate technology in the field of law way back in the 1990s. Legal start-up firms are collaborating with the government and private entities to offer innovative and quick solutions to mundane tasks done manually by lawyers. The LegalTech ecosystem in Australia has been driven by a strong grassroots movement that saw the launch of Legal Hackers chapters in Brisbane, Perth, and Sydney in 2017 and Melbourne in 2018, and the launch of the Australian Legal Technology Association (“ALTA”) in 2018.

Technology innovation in Singapore is primarily driven by legal technology companies seeking to solve problems in the legal industry that they have identified. Prominent innovative technologies that have been developed are practice management software and document assembly, legal research, and legal analytics systems. Asia Law Network developed Tessaract, a practice management software, which contains functionalities such as billing and expense tracking, creation and storage of case templates, and optical character recognition for extraction of text from documents. Tessaract was created as a response to feedback from lawyers that they had too many cases from Asia Law Network to handle. As further detailed below, Asia Law Network is a marketing platform that connects lawyers with parties seeking legal advice. While LegalTech companies are driving innovation, law firms are also increasingly adopting technology products in their services. This comes following a push in 2017 by MinLaw, LawSoc, and SPRING Singapore (now known as Enterprise Singapore) to encourage law firms, particularly the small- and medium-sized firms, to embrace basic technologies in their practices by allocating S$2.8 million to subsidize the cost of implementing such technologies.

Both Australia and Singapore have inculcated in-depth learning in student education regarding legal technology and innovation to give students an edge in the changing landscapes.

When it comes to China both private firms and public institutions have been actively developing legal technologies. Some important trends are AI, big data, and online legal service providers. AI-enabled robots capable of providing basic legal advice have been installed in different parts of China. For example, in a Beijing court, an AI robot named XiaoFa dispenses advice to over 40,000 litigation questions and 30,000 legal issues. In Qinghai’s legal service centers, another robot has been trained in a range of subjects such as marriage, labor, consumer rights, and mediation law. Apart from catering to the public, AI has also been utilized to assist judges. For example, the Shanghai High People’s Court partnered with iFlytek Co Ltd to implement a case review system. The system will be able to review up to 79 types of cases, suggest appropriate sentences, and evaluate whether the available evidence is sufficient to justify a particular sentence. This sophisticated software is outfitted with numerous capabilities, such as incremental learning, knowledge mining, and voice recognition. Big data has also been used to increase the legal system’s transparency. One prominent example is Legal Miner, whose products mine Chinese court decisions and offer solutions on risk assessments and strategy development. Another example is the Chinese government’s recently-compiled online database of 32 million judgments

And in Mongolia, one of the country’s leading domestic firms pushed the developing nation into legal tech. In November, MDSKhanLex launched iGeree, a legal tech platform that automates contracts and has a chatbot feature powered by artificial intelligence. The platform is the first significant legal tech initiative by a major firm in Mongolia. MDS KhanLex has more plans for legal tech. It is preparing to establish a dedicated research institute with local start-up CodeLex and is in collaboration with several companies in data engineering and AI.

INDIA IN THE FOCUS

Legal technology (“legal tech”) is evolving in India and over the last few years, entrepreneurship in this space has grown significantly. The lack of standardization and structure in the creation and organization of data is a major problem. With more than 33 million cases pending, the legal system is ripe for an overhaul. There are over 39,000 startups in India, with only around 100 to 200 startups focused on legal tech. Routine tasks are being automated using Artificial Intelligence (“AI”), Machine Learning (“ML”), and NLP. This includes contract review, document generators, case research, etc. The landscape of legal tech within the Indian start-up ecosystem includes the following:

·        AI-Powered legal assistants (MikeLegal6 and Pensieve);

·         AI Contract review and analysis (Anvi);

·         Legal marketplaces (LawRato9 and VakilSearch);

·         Data intelligence and research (Veratech);

·         Case research (Casemine)

·        Digital verification (Signzy)

·         contract creation and management (SpotDraft)

·        Legal literacy: free Indian law case search (IndiaKanoon)

·         FAQs on common legal topics (Nyaaya).

The legal industry is witnessing burgeoning growth aided by the emergence of new legal tech startups. Indian Kanoon is a leader in the field of legal literacy, whilst Sirion Labs is a player in contract management and enterprise supplier relationships. Other notable online legal services providers and marketplaces include LawRato, LegalRaasta, ProVakil, and VakilSearch, to name a few.

India’s legal tech landscape is growing organically with most startups being supported by passionate entrepreneurs, with only a handful funded by VCs. Despite the anonymity, client confidentiality of training data sets is a challenge and could lead to potential conflict and confidentiality issues. Many clients who are accustomed to LegalOperations and the use of AI and ML are more open to using software for more refined results.

With respect to privacy, there is a need to achieve a balance where technology and human interaction would compliment and co-exist. The emergence of legal aggregators has opened up issues as to whether these start-ups are encroaching upon the grey area of offering legal services and hence contravening the Bar Council Act that governs the conduct of lawyers and legal services in the country.

Having seen startups emerge in providing last-mile legal services delivery for the citizens of India, the governments and the judiciary are not far behind. As part of the Indian Government’s initiative to offer services to the public, the National Informatics Centre (“NIC”) has come out with eCourts Services, which is an application available on Google Play and iOSApp Store. This application provides information related to cases filed in subordinate courts and most of the high courts in India. The e-courts project was conceptualized on the basis of a report submitted by the E-committee(Supreme Court of India), with a vision to transform the Indian Judiciary. The Indian legal tech industry is conservatively worth about US$1.2 billion but this pales compared with the US and Europe. Nevertheless, the industry is witnessing a surge of start-ups to improve efficiency within the system. The legal regulator has shifted its stance on technology as an enabler and not disruptor. India is finding its ground between managing the aspirations of an emergent legal tech ecosystem and the laws that govern this domain. The Government (along with the Judiciary) should look at systems around the world such as Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Israel to examine the best practices that can be adopted.

Hence to conclude, we can see that despite a slow start the legal tech and innovation has jumped leaps and bounds in the past decade or so and only continues to grow, the only obstacles present is a lack of an open mindset that is prevalent in the legal profession in the region and the care given towards data integrity and confidentiality which is a topmost priority. But be sure, these issues will so be sorted to pave the way for more innovations and legal automation.