Against the context of Industrial Revolution 4.0, the legal industry is being disrupted by data analytics and artificial intelligence (“AI”). Legal analytics and AI-driven applications in the law is transforming the nature of legal service delivery across the US, Europe, Australia and now in Singapore. New forms of analytics-driven legal services have emerged in emerging areas such as judicial analytics, compliance and enforcement analytics. Just as IBM’s Watson has disrupted the banking and healthcare industries, Ross the so-called “AI lawyer” has emerged. How will all these affect legal professionals in the future? In this program, students will learn recent developments in the legal technology landscape and analyse the impact of data analytics and AI in both legal practice as well as in corporate legal departments. The program will cover (i) the rise of contract analytics in the review of transactional documents (ii) regulatory analytics in the context of compliance (iii) judicial analytics or court analytics; and (iv) analytics tools for in house legal team that could optimize external counsel resource allocation, cost management and internal productivity. The program will peek into the future where robo-advisory services are likely to creep into the legal advisory universe through the deployment of algorithmic thinking, unsupervised machine learning, advanced analytics and predictive coding. Students will learn how to manage emerging liability issues in the development of these cutting edge technologies. How will these developments affect the role of inhouse counsels and the role of lawyering in the future economy? This course will lay the foundation for lawyering in the technology driven future economy.

Note: There are no pre-requisites to attend this course and no technical background is required.

Aims

This elective aims to provide course participants with knowledge of:

1. the growing trends in legal technology internationally especially in the US and the UK;
2. the adoption of data analytics and AI in specific practice areas such as banking and finance, litigation and intellectual property practice; and
3. the development of alternative forms of technology-enabled lawyering.

Learning outcomes: On completion of this elective, students will:

1. be familiar with the literature and debates relating to data analytics, machine learning and AI in the law;
2. be able to assess the reasons informing and the implications of the growing adoption of legal technology solutions in the legal ecosystem
3. be able to appreciate the technical foundation of data analytics and AI and understand the complexity of developing technology-enabled legal solutions and the policy relevance of such inquiries;
4. be capable of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to the deployment of legal technology solutions in the lawyering process;
5. have developed the ability to research, analyse and communicate in an informed and critical way practical as well as empirical studies within the field of legal technological innovation;
6. be able to relate the issues in the legal technology to the practice of law; and
7. be able to fluently articulate their own views with regard to the issues debated within the legal technology universe.

Skills outcomes: The course participants will:

1. develop an understanding of how to manage legal analytics projects for both law firms as well as for governments;
2. be cognisant of the critical issues relating to different paradigms of lawyering with the aid of robo-advisory services;
3. have developed a detailed and applied knowledge of comparative contextual analysis for the application of legal technology in the US, UK when compared to emerging Asian economies;
4. be able to write cogently about international legal technology trends; and
5. be able to articulate the salient features of legal technology in the legal ecosystem.

COURSE STRUCTURE