Keynote Address by by Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs, Edwin Tong SC, at Litigation Conference 2026 - “The Human Essence of Advocacy in an AI-Enhanced World”
Honourable Judges
Prof Tan Cheng Han SC, President of the Law Society of Singapore
Friends and Colleagues
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
Opening
1. A very good morning. It is a real pleasure to be back here again at the Litigation Conference.
2. I am reminded that I last spoke at this Conference 5 years ago. 5 years, in the space that we are operating in, is a long time.
3. I would like to also extend my sincere thanks to the Law Society for once again organising this very important event –Eusuff, Seng Siew, and your team. It is a pleasure to also reconnect with fellow members of the Bar – a community I hold dear, and that I continue to see myself as a part of.
SGLaw200: 200 Years of Singapore’s Legal System
4. As we gather here today, I thought it would be fitting to start, as Cheng Han did, with the reflection as to the roots of the legal system that has shaped our profession.
5. I do not have gory stories of cockerels or joss sticks at the temple, but I thought, as we mark the bicentennial of Singapore’s modern legal system, to think back two centuries ago to the Singapore that we had then. A small trading post where commercial transactions were more straightforward, often sealed with a simple handshake or maybe on a handwritten paper bill or perhaps a promissory note that went to court many years ago. Disputes were simpler too, typically involving late cargo deliveries or breaches of trade contracts.
6. But in 1826, Singapore inherited the Second Charter of Justice, which laid the foundation for our current and modern legal system. It introduced a framework of laws applied across all communities, and has since become the bedrock of the system that we rely on today.
7. Over the past two centuries, what have we done with the Second Charter of Justice - we inherited it, but we have nurtured it, we have built on it, we adapted it, we contextualised it to the evolving needs of our own society. The result today is a legal system that is trusted around the world, predictable, and internationally respected.
8. Singapore today is consistently ranked amongst the top globally for our rule of law and for our legal system. We have a first-class judiciary and its case law and jurisprudence reaches different parts of the world, right across systems, whether common law or civil law.
9. But at the same time, we are also, and we have to be, very clear-eyed about what we have achieved. A good legal system has a much stronger value proposition when our people are able to meaningfully access it. Therefore, access to justice remains a fundamental priority for my Ministry.
10. Over the years, we have taken steady steps to strengthen access to justice. We have for instance, supported, and eventually funded as well, the Criminal Legal Aid Scheme (CLAS), and we continue today to stand behind Pro Bono SG. A few years ago, we established the Public Defender’s Office to institutionalise the provision of criminal legal aid. On civil legal aid, the Legal Aid Bureau has served Singaporeans well for almost 70 years now, and some of you might know that, a few months ago, we have announced that we will lower the eligibility thresholds so that more Singaporeans and Permanent Residents in Singapore can receive legal aid.
11. These efforts reflect our continued commitment to ensure that our legal system remains trusted, and also accessible to all, especially those who need it the most.
Trust in Singapore’s Legal System and Tangible Benefits
12. The trust we have built in our legal system and in the rule of law has had very real and tangible outcomes for us. Today, the Singapore brand stands for something.
13. It has made Singapore an attractive place not just for businesses to invest, but also for people to build their lives – for foreigners to come, and for Singaporeans to stay.
14. Singapore is now a regional, in many ways and respects, also global, hub for many international companies. Despite being one of the smallest states in the world, we consistently receive a significant share of global foreign direct investment, right here into Singapore. Nearly half of the world’s multinational corporations have their Asia-Pacific headquarters here in Singapore, and over 4,000 enterprises with revenues of at least $100 million operate out of Singapore.
15. This has in turn created good jobs for Singaporeans, and contributed meaningfully to our economy.
16. In today’s increasingly uncertain and fragmented world, trust has become a scarce commodity. And when trust is scarce, it becomes even more valuable. Businesses will naturally gravitate towards jurisdictions that are neutral, stable, and credible, and I believe Singapore is well positioned to be one of them.
17. That is why we, not just as a profession, but in particular at the litigation bar, must continue to remain open and multilateral in our outlook, even as others around the world might turn inwards. Last year, Singapore was ranked the most open economy in the world – the same year that global protectionism rose to levels not seen in the world since the 1930s.
18. This openness has included working closely with our like-minded partners around the world – strengthening our global connections through partnerships, agreements, and active collaborations as well as playing our part to contributions on the international stage.
19. I believe that this must also extend to our legal sector, which must continue to be outward facing and forward leaning. On a separate occasion, I will speak more about our plans to help law firms regionalise, go international and punch above its weight, looking at the region as our broader hinterland, and not just serving Singapore and Singaporeans within this jurisdiction.
AI and the Future of Litigation
20. But today, I thought to speak about something else that has been increasingly the forward momentum, not only in law, but especially in the litigation bar – defined very much by how we can understand, adapt, adopt and harness AI. It is the big disruptor of our generation.
21. I know much has been said about this previously. It sounds as if we take turns in Government and the Courts to speak about AI, but I think it is something that merits our deep attention. I spoke about this topic at “The Next Charter” event last month, and again at a similar event in London just last week. Last week, we got together all Singaporeans involved in the law – students, solicitors, barristers, general counsel, and had a meeting in London. My message to them was: stay connected to Singapore; be a part of Singapore; you can be global as well as be Singaporean at the same time. We also spent some time in London understanding the AI landscape. I know the Honourable Chief Justice spoke about it again very forcefully yesterday at Mass Call.
22. This morning, I thought to share a few of my thoughts on what AI means specifically for us in the space of litigation, with a sharper focus on what we need to do, on legal education and for us in the litigation bar, on professional development.
23. As you know, AI is already fundamentally altering how we practise litigation. It is no longer just a future concept that we read about or we find on the internet. It is currently already actively shaping the way we prepare cases, the way we manage documents, how arguments are developed, and how lawyers fundamentally deliver value to clients.
24. Today’s systems are able to review and summarise thousands of documents in a fraction of the time it used to take; generate first drafts of pleadings, affidavits, and written submissions in the blink of an eye; extract timelines and construct case chronologies from large document sets. I used to ask my associates to prepare a detailed table of chronology, and that was to me, the fundamental starting point of any case before you went to court. A lot of time was spent on it. But today, that can be done in a fraction of the time. AI can also surface relevant authorities, including case law from a myriad of different jurisdictions and procedural rules, with citations across many different legal systems.
25. What used to take days, weeks, or even months of painstaking manual review can now be done in minutes.
26. In the past, I am sure all of us remember our past days, especially those of my vintage, spending more hours doing discovery, sometimes with cartons and cartons on the floor, organising them. My first task as a pupil in those days, more than 30 years ago, was to organise about 6 files of documents into a chronological order – something that would take AI seconds to do today. It took me about a week, as a fresh pupil. But that foundational work which all of us went through almost as a rite of passage, in the way we trained our mind to focus, through mundane and repetitive work, to discern what would fit into the overall case structure and the arguments that you wanted to build – all of that is now being fundamentally compressed.
27. I mentioned that I was in London last week.
28. Whilst there, I took the opportunity to meet with a number of international firms, as well as several legaltech companies. This includes White & Case, A&O Shearman, Legora, Leah AI, pinqDR, amongst others, to understand how AI has developed as a cutting edge technology and how it is, more importantly, being integrated deeply into legal workflows.
29. A few points stood out very clearly for me which I thought I would share with you.
30. First, inasmuch as we are all, at least for me, bedazzled by each succeeding version of AI that comes into the market, I think we are still very much only at the beginning.
31. What we are seeing today is still the first stage of AI adoption in litigation. The pace of change is rapid, breakneck, and revolutionary. In fact, I learnt that no AI solution, whether is it Claude or DeepSeek or ChatGPT or Gemini, stays at the top for anything more than an average of 37 days, before being displaced by another version released onto the market. The race to the top is never ending.
32. More significant developments are already on the horizon. We are beginning to see AI move beyond simple support functions into more active agentic roles in disputes work. For example, in some jurisdictions, AI tools are already being used to handle low-value, high-volume disputes, particularly in cases like consumer claims or debt recovery, with minimal human intervention. These studies are designed to find out if they can dispense entirely with human intervention at some point.
33. Advanced systems are starting to stress-test legal arguments, running different factual permutations against existing case law, to assess how a claim or defence might perform under different scenarios. You put in the evidence, the affidavits, and you see the tweaks that the AI begins to generate. You can even work out how such arguments might or might not find favour between the different judges. So once you get your quorum, you might find out that this judge might or might not favour such arguments.
34. All the more so in complex commercial disputes involving large datasets and multi-jurisdictional evidence, AI is now increasingly becoming the norm – being used to simulate potential outcomes, as well as identify pressure points much earlier in the lifecycle of the case.
35. These developments, as I said at the start, are still developing and nascent, but they point to a future where litigation strategy will be increasingly shaped by computational analysis alongside legal reasoning. Over time, this could change not just how disputes are prepared, but how they are going to be managed end-to-end. And it will have a deep impact on the way we practice litigation, if not already.
36. My second observation is that as a consequence of this, client expectations are changing fast.
37. Many clients are already using AI tools internally to generate first drafts of chronologies, position papers, or document summaries, maybe even a memo on the chances of success. They then expect their external counsel to validate, refine, and strengthen these outputs. This leads to at least three clear expectations: First, faster turnaround times, especially for research, drafting, and document-heavy work will be expected of lawyers. Second, greater emphasis on higher-value contributions from lawyers, such as strategy, risk assessment, and advocacy. Third, increasingly, a baseline expectation that firms must deploy AI in all of their cases, especially those that are document intensive, to improve efficiency.
38. In fact, clients are beginning to question why they should engage firms that are not using AI effectively. This in turn, will inevitably place pressure on the traditional time-based billing models, and accelerate the shift towards more value-based as well as outcome-focused pricing. It will have an inevitable impact on the economics of legal practice, as well as a material bearing on legal training and professional development, as clients will no longer want to pay for lawyers to do what AI can do in a matter of minutes. I will come back to this point on training in a short moment.
39. But my third observation is one which I think is perhaps most material for the bar today, is this : notwithstanding all the technology that we have seen, the human judgment continues to command a premium, especially for the work that all of you do in litigation.
40. Even as AI capabilities expand, the role of the litigator, in my view, remains indispensable. AI can be highly effective in document management, large-scale document review and summaries, identifying patterns across different evidence sets; research, first drafts, memos.
41. But I think it remains far less effective, and is likely to remain so, in the domain of litigation practice: oral advocacy in court; cross-examination of witnesses; assessing credibility and human behaviour on the spot in a dynamic fashion; making real-time judgment calls under pressure during proceedings. What question to ask in a cross examination, what not to ask, these are all judgments that you make in a real time every time you are in court. I do not believe the AI can replace this.
42. All of this involves intuition, persuasion, timing, judgment, all of that gleaned over many years of experience — qualities that I believe remain distinctly human. So the role of AI in litigation is not therefore, substitution, but augmentation. What can you do together with AI? It will allow lawyers to spend less time on mechanical work, and more time on parts of the case that really matter most, where professional judgment really makes a difference. It will allow lawyers to fulfil roles which move up the value chain, and a younger lawyer can today expect to take on tasks which were previously carried out by a more senior lawyer.
Supporting the Profession
43. Still, because AI is here to stay, we will therefore need to respond, as a jurisdiction, as a nation, and as a profession. We also need to take steps to ensure that the litigation bar is properly supported on this journey.
44. On this point, and I just pause for a moment to underscore, what the Honourable Chief Justice said yesterday, the legal fraternity in Singapore, including the Courts, the AGC, the Law Society, the Singapore Academy of Law, the law schools, as well as my Ministry, are committed to supporting all of you on this transition, including and especially in the context of today, the continuing development of our litigators, and more importantly, our young litigators.
45. For instance, MinLaw recently issued the Guide for Using Generative AI in the Legal Sector, to set out what we see as our guidance on the responsibilities to using AI, focusing on core professional responsibilities, such as professional ethics, confidentiality, and transparency. We believe that now is not the time yet to hard-code and legislate, because we want the ability to have some degree of flexibility and sandboxing as we explore the innovative development and evolution of AI. So we have set up a guide for the profession.
46. We are also supporting law firms directly, through grants and initiatives, to make this transition not just likely but probable and more sustainable in the longer term. We recently piloted the Legal Innovation and Future-Readiness Transformation (LIFT) initiative. It is a pilot which helps firms in a very curated and tailored fashion – diagnose the pain points in their own workflows, because no two firms are the same in the way which you practise and the way in which you run your firm in the back end; identify the appropriate tools that might be on the market; and integrate them into their practice. To date, 15 firms have joined this pilot, of which 11 have a disputes practice.
47. We want to ensure that firms of all sizes, not just the largest, can benefit from these tools, and can work with us, and that the overall standard of litigation practice continues to rise across the board in a sustainable fashion.
48. We put LIFT in place precisely for this purpose, because we recognise that AI and technology adoption is not about procuring the best or the most expensive, or the most powerful model or product on the market, and then expecting that it will jumpstart your tech adoption. Rather, it is about managing and embedding AI changes within the everyday workflows of a particular legal practice. It must work for you, and not the other way round.
49. In addition, tech adoption and integration must be a product of not just the technological tools that you might find on the market, but it must be a product of deliberate mindset and workplace culture shifts and changes, both of which I would hasten to add, needs to start from the top. In that way, tech adoption is non-delegable in my view. Leaders of law firms and other organisations must lead by example, and the best way to do this is from the top. You cannot say to your IT department, go out there and find the best IT tool, buy it, that is it. It will not work that way.
50. All of these initiatives, in my view, as well as a cultural mindset, will help us to speed up the integration of AI into our own work processes.
51. But even as we do, and I now come to professional development and education, we must not forget that litigation is, at its core, a craft that is developed through observation, mentorship, and experience. Many of us have gone through, I have gone through that many years ago in my formative years. Litigation is deeply about human interaction. At the end of the day, what we are doing, especially when we are in court, is a forensic inquiry into human behaviour – to work out what the facts were, and through a forensic interrogation, to find out what happened between humans.
52. AI will of course fundamentally alter how that experience, by a young lawyer especially, is gained. If junior lawyers no longer review documents line by line, as we used to do, or search up each case authority with dusty old law journals and understand how they might apply or perhaps be distinguished. how would they develop an instinct for what matters and what does not matter? If drafting is increasingly AI-assisted, how do young lawyers learn to build arguments from first principles?
53. These I believe are important questions that as a bar, we must confront early on, and I think we must get this solution right.
54. It has been increasingly clear to me at least, that law school education, both in its curriculum as well as in its pedagogy, will have to change fundamentally.
55. Indeed, law schools in many jurisdictions have already begun integrating AI into their curricula, and our law schools are no different. Just to cite a couple of examples.
56. Stanford Law School has integrated AI training into its curriculum directly, to help students to prepare for changing legal practices in a technology-driven landscape. For example, Stanford students use AI for spotting legal issues, summarising discovery documents, drafting research emails, editing, and so on. Students are also given AI-generated answers to hypothetical problems, and asked to critique and grade them. This helps to train judgement, not just usage. Stanford also recently added two AI-focused librarians, one specialising in data science and AI, and the other in emerging AI technologies.
57. Boston University of Law partners with legaltech providers directly, to provide their students with hands-on instruction in the use of advanced, law-focused AI platforms, such as Harvey, Claude and Legora, as well as other emerging technologies. This best prepares a young student for the demands of an AI-driven legal practice once they graduate.
58. In parallel, UK firms are themselves also partnering with law schools to scale AI capability. For example, King’s College London has launched a structured AI literacy programmes with major firms, such as Freshfields and Hugh James, to train their trainees and lawyers. The course is led by Professor Dan Hunter, who is the Executive Dean of the Law School at King’s College, and is himself also a world-leading AI and law researcher.
59. Our own schools, as I have said, have also started incorporating AI into their courses. For example, NUS Law built AI chatbots to simulate witnesses for cross-examination practice, and SMU Law has dedicated courses on AI in legal practice.
60. But I believe there is scope to go further – in fact, much further. I think we need to fundamentally re-think how we teach, and what we teach.
61. Importantly, law schools can no longer be purely academic institutions in this space. They must be closely connected to practice, working alongside law firms and legal technology providers, to ensure students are equipped for how legal work is actually being transformed.
62. Because if we do not, then how do we expect a young lawyer coming out of law school, to compete against his AI-enabled competitor, if we do not impart that training in his formative years in law school, for that student to become native and fluent in both the law and in AI?
63. And we should also perhaps ask – who else should be doing this teaching? Should we not also consider if legal AI and information engineers ought to also have a place in the law teaching faculty?
64. We will have to explore these changes very carefully and very deliberately, in consultation with the stakeholders here, especially those involved in legal education.
65. But I believe, change – we must.
66. As John Dewey, an American educational philosopher, said more than 100 years ago in 1916, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” I think that is the mindset that we need to carry with us as we look at the legal education in this quickly evolving space of AI.
67. At the same time, because so much of what used to hone our basic skills, such as research, memo drafting, document management and so on, will be taken over by AI, continuous professional development will become increasingly critical. Even the AI that we are trained on today could be outmoded in a matter of months, maybe days, in today’s quickly evolving times.
68. We are therefore considering allocating a portion of CPD points directly to AI-related courses, so that lawyers, as they embark on practice, keep themselves updated regularly through CPD programmes.
69. At the same time, going back to what I said at the outset, I believe that practice, in this case, still matters — deeply.
70. To be effective litigators, there is really no substitute for all of us. First, to do the hard work in getting out documents, cross-examination notes, papers, reviews, chronologies, summaries, getting up a case, and then being “on your feet” in court – “on your feet”, not “on your screen”.
71. I say that particularly because during COVID, many hearings moved online. It was necessary at the time, but I fear that this might have had an unintended consequence of reducing opportunities for young lawyers to observe court dynamics and develop advocacy skills in person.
72. One learns so much by simply being present in the moment, as evidence is taken, or oral arguments are developed, in court.
73. As young lawyers, or even today as we practise each day, we learn to simultaneously watch the judge’s pen. Remember we were told as one of our first lessons to watch the judge’s pen (in those days). Perhaps today, it is to watch the judge’s mouse. Also to watch the demeanour – Is he frowning at you? Is he crinkling his nose because you are making a bad point? We must then simultaneously observe our opposing counsel who is sitting across from you, and perhaps the second chair as well. At the same time, take instructions from your client who is seated behind you, sometimes quite excitably, and then trying to steal a glance at the next document that is going to come up, that you will rely on and work out whether you should ask the next question or not.
74. Nothing quite prepares you for this moment, except first by observing, and then practising.
75. So I would like to see us preserve the in-person aspects of litigation practice as much as possible, where the craft is most clearly observed, learned, and then passed on.
76. Judgment, timing, and intuition in litigation, these are the tools of our trade, and they are critical skills for which AI, at the moment at least and for the foreseeable future, cannot compete with the advocate. We must ensure that for all the advancement, all the evolution, and all the significant improvements that we will see downstream on AI, that we will not lose this edge.
A Collective Responsibility
77. Turning back to what we do for the junior segment of the bar, adapting to AI in litigation cannot be driven by policy alone.
78. I think it requires a collective effort right across the profession – policymakers like myself, the judiciary, law firms, senior lawyers, junior lawyers, academia.
79. Each of us must engage intentionally and deliberately, to embrace, enhance and then embed that change.
80. The Future of the Legal Profession Committee, which the Honourable Chief Justice and I co-chair, will be looking into all of these issues more closely, in consultation with the key stakeholders tasked to drive this change.
Conclusion
81. Let me now conclude, this morning.
82. I know I spent quite a number of minutes on my message, but if you forget everything else that I have said, and there is just one message to take away from this morning, it should be this:
83. Today, we stand at a serious inflection point in practice –in particular, litigation practice – where technology, client expectations, and global competition are all shifting at pace and coalescing with one other. AI will undoubtedly change how we work: how we prepare cases, how we conduct research, and how we deliver value. But even as the tools evolve, the essence of litigation must remain constant, and that is the clarity of thought, rigour in analysis, and the ability to persuade through sound judgment and advocacy.
84. Singapore’s legal system has endured and adapted, and I would say, significantly enhanced, over the last two centuries because it has never been static. It has evolved with the times, whilst always remaining anchored in trust, fairness, professionalism, and deep adherence to the rule of law.
85. That same spirit of adaptation must guide us today.
86. If we embrace change thoughtfully, without losing sight of what defines us as lawyers, we will not only remain relevant, we will thrive in this new environment. We will continue through that adaptation, to strengthen Singapore’s position as a trusted and leading dispute resolution hub, because this is a legacy that we will leave for those who come after us, beyond the 200 years of the Second Charter, and well into the next, for this very noble profession.
87. On that note, I thank you very much. I hope you enjoy the conference, and inasmuch as you listen to the speakers on the stage, please also use the opportunity to make in-person networking and connections in this valuable community, because this ultimately is why we call each other “my learned friend”.
88. Thank you.
Last updated on 21 April 2026