Driving the Next Stage of the Singapore Legal Industry’s Digitalisation Journey Through the Legal Innovation and Future-Readiness Transformation (LIFT) Initiative
30 June 2025 Posted in Press releases
1. The Ministry of Law (MinLaw) launched the pilot of the Legal Innovation and Future-Readiness Transformation (LIFT) Initiative today. LIFT is MinLaw’s next phase of sector-wide legaltech initiatives to support the legal industry in its digitalisation efforts.
2. Through a series of in-depth surveys and consultations with the legal industry, change management was identified as one of the top challenges to legaltech adoption for law firms, particularly for small and medium firms.
3. Thus, the LIFT pilot will support law firms in diagnosing their technology needs, adopting and implementing legaltech solutions specific to their practice areas. To enable this, MinLaw will deploy legaltech consultants, from our appointed partner PwC NewLaw, to law firms to help drive the end-to-end process of adopting legaltech solutions.
a. The consultants will identify existing process gaps within firms, recommend suitable legaltech solutions based on these gaps, implement the chosen solutions, and subsequently optimise firms’ usage of the chosen solutions.
b. This addresses a key challenge that law firms face in their digitalisation journey, so that they can successfully digitalise and ultimately free up lawyers’ valuable time to focus on substantive matters such as client-facing work, strategy and business development.
LIFT Pilot
4. LIFT aims to help law firms select legaltech solutions according to their unique needs, and subsequently with the onboarding of these legaltech solutions.
5. The initial intensive phase of the initiative will span about two months, followed by about five months of aftercare support. In a “project manager” role, the legaltech consultants will:
a. Identify gaps within law firms that can be improved via legaltech by mapping out their current processes and workflows specific to their practice areas;
b. Recommend suitable legaltech solutions based on an analysis of law firms’ needs, such as technology requirements, budget considerations, and resources. This would include product demonstrations of such solutions;
c. Implement the legaltech solutions selected by law firms and provide support with adoption issues such as product on-boarding, data migration and troubleshooting. The legaltech consultant may also help to coordinate with relevant legaltech providers to develop training materials tailored to law firms’ needs; and
d. Optimise law firms’ usage of the new legaltech solutions by reviewing their usage patterns and providing recommendations to fine-tune their processes and maximise efficiency. The legaltech consultant may also help to facilitate further training sessions with the legaltech providers or develop custom Standard Operating Procedures to enhance user experience and the solutions’ usability.
6. The initiative will be administered through a co-payment scheme, with law firms paying a portion of the consultancy fees, and MinLaw supporting the remainder.
7. The pilot phase of LIFT commenced today, and is expected to conclude by the third quarter of 2026. MinLaw will refine future sector-wide legaltech initiatives based on the outcomes and learning points from the pilot.
Legal Technology Platform
8. The Legal Technology Platform (LTP) is a collaboration between MinLaw and its technology partner, Lupl, and was launched on 19 July 2022. MinLaw supported this collaboration to catalyse legaltech development, drive a higher level of legaltech adoption and help our law firms and lawyers to level up, recognising that legaltech is a key strategy for Singapore to remain an internationally competitive legal services hub of choice. One of the objectives of this catalyst phase was to get the LTP to a point where it could stand alone as an industry-driven and -operated tool.
9. The legaltech market has since matured with greater integration among commercial solutions, including the LTP, practice management systems, document management systems, Microsoft tools and even GenAI solutions such as Copilot for Microsoft 365. Alongside this, there is a greater awareness and understanding of legaltech among our law firms and lawyers. With the successful completion of the MinLaw-Lupl collaboration as planned on 11 August 2025, Lupl will continue operating the LTP independently as an industry-driven product.
10. Beyond the LTP, MinLaw will focus efforts through LIFT to provide broader support to lawyers and law firms to adopt legaltech, as part of our efforts to ensure the continued advancement and competitiveness of our legal industry.
MINISTRY OF LAW
30 JUNE 2025
Last updated on 30 June 2025