Forum Magazine: State of Legal Innovation in APAC - Trends from a New Study by SAL

The idea for a comprehensive look at the state of legal technology development across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region was born of a very local need: Singapore’s Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) initiative was trying to groom new technology start-ups for success.

“But for those businesses to scale and thrive, they needed to look beyond the Singapore market from day zero,” says Paul Neo, the founder of FLIP and COO of the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL). “The Singapore legal market is only slightly more than US$2 billion a year in turnover. It’s really a very tiny market and, clearly, any legal technology start-up, or any start-up in any sector, has to produce products and services that are relevant for markets beyond Singapore if they are going to be sustainable.”

That need to understand legal tech markets in the region led SAL to commission a report under FLIP and produced in collaboration with the Singapore Management University Law School. The research was presented for the first time at the FutureLaw Conference at Stanford University Law School in the spring of 2019.

The report covers legal tech developments in seven jurisdictions: Australia, China, Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Russia and Singapore. As might be expected, the state of legal innovation varies quite a bit among those jurisdictions, given the very different market situations in each, including differences in size, nature of the legal system, legal education and “openness” of the various cultures.

The latest trends in legal tech can be found here.

Click here for the full report.