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.
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.
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