SPEECH BY THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE KWEK MEAN LUCK
CHAIR, LAWNET TECHNOLOGY SERVICES
TECHLAW.FEST 2025 (11 SEPTEMBER 2025)
1. Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, a very good morning.
LawNet: 35 Years of Evolution and Innovation
2. This year, we celebrate 35 years of LawNet. This is 35 years of LawNet serving as the primary and trusted legal research tool for Singapore’s legal community. Throughout this time, LawNet has kept pace with the way law is practised, taught, and accessed.
3. In the early days, in the 1990s, LawNet was literally a wide area network, or what was called “WAN”. Lawyers would connect to it using dial up modems and access the Singapore Statutes database. This later became the Legal Workbench and included access to case law. With the advent of the Internet, LawNet morphed from a WAN into a web portal.
4. Over the past decades, LawNet has expanded its legal research content. It has gone beyond statutes and case law, to journals, databases for criminal sentencing and personal injury awards, as well as case law from jurisdictions such as Malaysia, India and the United Kingdom.
Most recently, we included new content such as the Academy Library which provides access to legal textbooks, and the LawNet Precedents, which offers access to contractual precedents.
5. Each stage of LawNet’s development has been a deliberate response to the increasing complexity of legal work and the growing demands on legal professionals. Throughout this time, we have partnered with public agencies and research institutions, to identify the most relevant technology and contextualise it for our legal sector.
6. As the custodian of LawNet, the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) is dedicated to ensuring that legal research remains affordable and accessible to all lawyers. At last year’s TechLaw.Fest, I launched the public beta of LawNet.com. Many of you have tried this new portal and we have received helpful feedback from you.
7. Today, we take several steps forward, with the launch of LawNet 4.0.
Improved user experience
8. We have redesigned LawNet’s user interface, drawing on extensive user feedback to create a more seamless and user-friendly experience. Given the breadth of legal research content available in LawNet, the extension of this new design language to all modules in LawNet, will be done progressively. We aim to complete this transition by the end of 2026.
9. The improvements to LawNet are not just skin deep. We listened to the feedback from our young lawyers. In addition to the new LawNet user experience, there will also be enhancements to LawNet’s search capabilities. We are introducing natural language search capabilities in LawNet. This enables our users to ask questions in plain English, making the platform far more intuitive and accessible. For those who prefer using keywords to search, that remains possible. The single search bar will seamlessly detect either type of search and meet your request.
Adding value beyond access
10. Today, Gen AI is revolutionising legal research across the board, making legal content — especially judgments and legislation — widely accessible on many more non-legal platforms. Being generic platforms, information from such platforms naturally come with some level of inaccuracy.
11. At LawNet Technology Services, we have been looking at and experimenting with Gen AI in an intentional manner, to see how we can provide legal research in LawNet, that is at the level of quality and accuracy that our legal professionals need — and that our legal community can safely rely on in our professional practice.
12. In particular, we are focusing on using Gen AI to develop new functions, drawing on LawNet’s library of legal materials, to provide enhanced legal research, without compromising quality or accuracy.
13. Among these functions, summarisation stood out as the earliest feature to mature. This led us to launch AI-generated summaries for unreported judgement (URJs) on LawNet last year. Summarisation enables users to quickly grasp key points without having to wade through dense documents, significantly enhancing work efficiency.
14. We worked with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to finetune an open source LLM model using LawNet data and tapped on the assistance of Justices’ Law Clerks (JLC) for feedback, during the reinforcement learning phase of model training. This approach has allowed us to roll out the summarisation feature, with a much higher level of accuracy.
We provided these summaries in the style of Singapore Law Reports headnotes, for greater familiarity to users.
15. To date, we have generated AI-powered summaries for over 15,000 unreported judgments. By the end of this year, we will extend this feature to more than 1,500 tribunal decisions — including those of the Competition Commission of Singapore and the Personal Data Protection Commission.
16. The summarisation feature is just the tip of the iceberg. We are now moving beyond summarising individual documents and onto the next frontier — multi-document summarisation. This means connecting insights across jurisdictions, statutes, and legal commentaries to provide more holistic, contextualised answers, to better support complex legal research.
Launch of Q&A search feature on LawNet 4.0
17. Today, we are excited to launch a public early access experience, for LawNet users to explore new features early and shape their development.
18. One of the key innovations is the Q&A-based search function. It is powered by the GPT-Legal Q&A model, developed in collaboration with IMDA, the Ministry of Law, and a team of JLCs. This is a game-changing feature. This new function enables lawyers to ask legal research questions in natural language, and receive contextual, relevant responses, which are generated by AI grounded in LawNet’s content. It is designed to complement traditional keyword-based search by offering a more intuitive and responsive research experience.
19. This is a significant undertaking. It involves extensive development and rigorous testing, to align technology to the demands of your work. As such, we will be rolling out this implementation in phases.
20. At this initial stage, we will first focus on tuning the AI’s responses in the field of contract law — a fundamental area of law that underpins many specialised fields. We will progressively move to tune the AI to other significant areas of law and eventually offer this feature to all areas.
21. We are also piloting another new feature on LawNet, which is akin to an online Annotated Statute, driven by AI.
Initially, this feature will allow users to view the list of judgments that are relevant to provisions of a statute, using LawNet’s existing Reference Trace data.
22. We will use Gen AI to create annotations for statutory provisions. We have developed a proof of concept for this with AI Singapore (AISG), that automates what was once a labour-intensive effort that could only be updated infrequently. With GenAI, we can provide dynamic updates as new judgments are issued.
23. Consistent with our phased approach to rolling out new features, we will start this with the Companies Act, but will progressively extend to other major pieces of legislation, that have been the subject of judicial interpretation and academic commentary.
24. These efforts represent LawNet’s commitment to deliver quality legal research to users from both the common law and statutory law end.
25. These steps into more advanced Gen AI features in LawNet, could only have been taken with the help of our collaborators and partners.
I would like to thank all our partners — AISG, IMDA, the Ministry of Law and the teams of JLCs — for their invaluable support and collaboration, which have been instrumental in developing and delivering these AI capabilities for LawNet.
26. As we pilot these new features, we ask for your patience but also your feedback and insights. LawNet is your tool. We warmly welcome volunteers to use the features and help us improve them through your feedback. We want to make LawNet work even better for users. Later this morning, we will be showcasing these latest LawNet 4.0 capabilities. I strongly encourage you to visit the TechTalk Stage to see a live demonstration of our latest LawNet platform.
27. Before I conclude on this section regarding LawNet’s new AI capabilities, I would like to also speak with you, in my capacity as a Judge. While SAL will do all this to maximise value to our users, every user must take responsibility for the outputs drawn from AI, including those from LawNet, and check them as appropriate. These are tools, and as legal professionals, you are ultimately responsible for your own work.
Global Partnerships with International Content Providers
28. Even as we launch LawNet 4.0 and the new Gen-AI features that I have described, we are also taking other steps to help Singapore firms operate on the global stage. Such firms require access to legal international content providers (ICPs). However, the ICPs do not have access to Singapore legal materials, such as the Singapore Law Reports. This means that Singapore firms operating internationally have to subscribe to both the ICPs and LawNet, to access international and Singapore law content. At the same time, the lack of access to Singapore law on ICP platforms makes it harder for other jurisdictions to locate Singapore judgments, which have been increasingly cited over the years.
29. I am therefore pleased to announce that SAL is partnering four leading legal international content providers (ICPs) – LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, vLex and Legora, to provide global access to the comprehensive collection of Singapore judgments, including the official law report series, the Singapore Law Reports.
Later this morning, we will mark this milestone by formalising the signing of official agreements with our ICP partners. With effect from 1 October 2025, Singapore case law will be accessible on LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, vLex and Legora platforms.
30. This step will:
• facilitate the local profession’s access to one-stop legal research platforms for both Singapore law and international law content; and
• enable lawyers and legal researchers from other jurisdictions to more easily access and research Singapore cases. This will help raise the visibility and citation of Singapore cases, and further the Singapore Academy of Law’s mission of promoting Singapore law globally.
In addition, SAL is partnering with Legora to integrate SAL’s database of contract precedents on the Legora platform. This will enable SAL to draw on AI-assisted contract drafting and review for
our Singapore legal community.
31. Even as we enter into partnership with global ICPs, I want to reiterate that SAL continues to be committed to maintaining LawNet as an affordable and high quality legal tool for our legal community in Singapore.
32. As I shared earlier, we will continue to identify the best of class technology and find ways to contextualise it for our legal research needs, introducing new features and enhancing LawNet, just as we have been doing for the last 35 years.
Conclusion
33. As we mark this next phase, we invite you to take a moment to watch a video that traces LawNet’s journey from its humble beginnings to its evolution over the years. On this note, I hope you enjoy the conference and the insightful discussions ahead. Thank you.