September 12, 2024
SINGAPORE – Lawyers in the Republic can use a new artificial intelligence (AI) service to research and summarise walls of text from some 15,000 case judgments throughout Singapore’s judicial history since 1965.
About 10,000 other case judgments have been summarised by clerks, adding to a total of some 25,000 case judgments that will be accessible to users of the revamped LawNet legal research portal on Sept 12.
Developed by the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority, the AI service aims to help lawyers here prepare for cases more efficiently.
The new service, called LawNet AI, was showcased on Sept 11 at legal conference TechLaw.Fest, which was organised by the Ministry of Law and SAL.
Nearly all lawyers here subscribe to LawNet, which was set up by SAL in 1990, to look up past cases and conduct research.
Most of these case judgments are not summarised and exist only as lengthy transcripts, which can be “painful” for lawyers to sift through, said SAL chief technology officer Kenta Kusano, who is also the chief executive of LawNet Technology Services.
To reduce the risks of the AI service generating incorrect or nonsensical results, otherwise known as AI hallucinations, close to 350 AI-generated results were reviewed by justices’ law clerks, who support judges during court hearings and are familiar with the cases being summarised, he added.
“The reviewed copies were fed back to the AI, to make it even more accurate,” he added.
Justices’ law clerks will continue to summarise judgments selected by the Council of Law Reporting, while LawNet AI will summarise those not selected.
The system comes with guard rails, including a tool to highlight parts of the AI service’s response that appear to deviate significantly from the original case judgment – a sign of hallucination, said Mr Kusano.
Paragraphs in the AI-generated summary are also labelled with references to the original sources to help users fact-check with ease.
The improvements to LawNet were among several new services featured at the conference, which is being held at the Sands Expo & Convention Centre on Sept 11 and 12.
For up to two years, legal firms can receive 70 per cent in grants from the Government to adopt services under the Legal Technology Platform, which will include Microsoft’s Copilot, the tech company’s generative AI assistant to help create drafts and manage administrative work.
Second Minister for Law Edwin Tong, who was a panellist at the conference, announced a guide to help lawyers make better use of generative AI tools, including techniques for more specific prompts to get more accurate responses.
He said such grants aim to help firms defray costs, which are among the biggest obstacles for firms in adopting new technologies.
Second Minister for Law Edwin Tong announced a guide to help lawyers make better use of generative AI tools. PHOTO: THE STRAITS TIMES
In a discussion of AI adoption in the legal sector, Justice Aedit Abdullah stressed the importance of fact-checking, adding that lawyers still bear responsibility for their work regardless of whether it was produced with the help of AI.
Separately, in a discussion on the impact of AI on creative industries, panellists discussed issues of plagiarism and copyright.
Straits Times tech editor Irene Tham said developers at The Straits Times, in experimenting with an AI model to assist reporters with research, designed the system to refer to stories from its own archives, preventing it from potentially plagiarising external sources or regurgitating inaccurate information.
“Our AI is trained on our own data,” said Ms Tham. “We do not let it go out to grab stuff from the internet because it affects accuracy, and there is no compromise on that.”
Mr Kevin Zhang, founder of idoLive, a marketing firm that uses AI-generated avatars, said the firm has worked with celebrities to use their likeness for AI-generated advertisements, which has helped to reduce costs and boost efficiency.
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry regional director Simon Seow said it is important for developers to receive consent and collaborate with those whose likenesses are being used, as doing so will help the content generated by the AI model to be respected.
He added: “The same applies with the transparency of information used. You need to make sure you record the data that is used (to train AI) and be transparent about it to answer questions on copyright and potential biases.”
Mr Seow said: “The bottom line is about collaboration… To quote an old proverb, ‘if you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together’.”