AI-powered search engine to help Singapore lawyers with legal research

An artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine is expected to accelerate legal research and free up time for about 10,000 subscribers to legal research platform LawNet — or more than three-quarters of private lawyers working in Singapore.

- Lee Li Ying

An artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine is expected to accelerate legal research and free up time for about 10,000 subscribers to legal research platform LawNet – or more than three-quarters of private lawyers working in Singapore.

Developed by the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) in collaboration with the Infocomm Media Development Authority, this new tool allows lawyers to ask legal research questions in natural language and receive contextual, relevant responses.

It is trained on Singapore's legal context and supported by data such as judgments, Singapore Law Reports, legislation and books.

GPT-Legal Q&A, which has been rolled out on LawNet, was launched by Justice Kwek Mean Luck on the second day of the TechLaw.Fest on Sept 11 at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre.

The earlier GPT-Legal model launched in 2024 provided summaries of unreported court judgments, and has since been used to generate more than 15,000 of them.

"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," said Justice Kwek in a speech.

"It is designed to complement traditional keyword-based search by offering a more intuitive and responsive research experience."

The previous search function required users to key in exact terms and use quotation marks to refine a search.