The defining frontier of law today is human striving

WHILE today’s defining conversations centre on artificial intelligence, technology is not – or at least should not be – the defining frontier for the legal profession.

Instead, our frontier remains what it has always been: a human striving for goodness against evil, meaning against caprice and truth against falsehood.

We can – and should – use AI deliberately and make the most of what it can offer. This will help us confront the human frontier of pressures that lawyers face today.

What can technology do? A prima facie response would be that it is a productivity tool that creates additional capacity.

Wolters Kluwer’s 2026 Future Ready Lawyer Survey found that 62 per cent of legal professionals are already saving between 6 and 20 per cent of their working week through AI.

Just as new technologies removed back-breaking manual labour in past eras, so too can AI do the equivalent for us today. This is trite knowledge.

Let us consider instead a very different philosophy of implementation: What gives meaning to the practice of law?

The Turing Test and legal judgment

The British mathematician Alan Turing devised a test for machine deception.

Suppose you typed questions into a machine, and both a human and a machine reply. If you cannot tell the two apart, then the machine passes. You are deceived into thinking an artificial thing is human.

SEE ALSO

The challenges of an AI-powered legal industry

Singapore issues guidelines for lawyers on ethical generative AI use

Law is a calling and a public institution, not just a technical craft

We strive to build ever more capable machines, but we do so in vain if we forget the reason for striving.

In legal practice, we can use AI to make us more productive and to build capacity.

But especially for new lawyers, if the struggle, the grind, the memorisation and eventually the ability to make sound judgments, come from human labour, from reading real cases rather than summaries, writing your own notes rather than having AI generate them from transcripts of recordings, from writing your arguments on your own – then do it.

Developing judgment and legal acumen takes time, as a human endeavour.

Taking the hours, days and years is neither Luddite nor naive; it is what we do when we pay close attention to the meaning of our profession.

Lawyers harness words to construct human perception of fact, values and notions of right and wrong, good and bad.

There is something less than human if we forbear this construction ourselves, and build a flimsy foundation justified in the name of efficiency, cost reductions or worse, relying on the perceived notion of “being at the frontier of technology”.

If being a good human lawyer requires us to train ourselves by sometimes doing what a machine can do, then do it. This is especially so for young lawyers who require the time to develop and mature. The journey towards meaning demands this.

Embracing technology does not require uncritical surrender to it. Read this carefully: By all means, embrace technology, invest in it, train people to be fluent in it, but do so with eyes open.

Implementation must be adaptive rather than driven by the fear of appearing backward. The legal profession must strike our own path.

The government has been strongly supportive of this intentional transformation.

Small and medium-sized law firms should sign up for the Legal Innovation and Future-Readiness Transformation pilot initiative to assess and implement suitable AI tools.

To keep our laws responsive to change more broadly, not just to the AI wave, the Ministry of Law and Intellectual Property (IP) Office of Singapore have launched a public consultation on AI and IP.

And to help law firms and legaltech providers make informed choices, the Infocomm Media Development Authority and tech firm Scale AI have developed a benchmark for how well large language models actually understand Singapore law.

What it means to be a lawyer now

Lawyers are asking: If AI can research, draft and summarise faster than any one of us, what is actually left for me to do?

If machines can pass the Turing Test, and clients cannot tell us apart from an AI avatar, is there still room for me? My view is yes.

As a non-mathematician, I believe the meaning of the Turing Test is a human one.

AI strives towards passing the test, but it is a test of deception. Even in passing the test, the AI fails. AI is fundamentally blind to morality, good or evil.

The machines strive towards perfection, without knowing what this striving is for, or understanding the imperfectness of humans.

The critical distinction lies between assistance and responsibility. AI can assist us in our work. But it is the human lawyer, not the tool, who remains answerable for what is filed, argued or advised. The human is to be blamed and credited; the human carries moral culpability.

That distinction, between what a tool can produce and what a person must answer for, is not a constraint on the profession’s future. In fact, that distinction is the profession’s future as it was in our past.

Who answers for wrong and harm is not a question a machine can address – it is, as it has ever been, our bread and butter (that is another distinction between us and AI).

Clients will not pay a premium for what a machine can generate. They will pay, however, for the lawyer with sound professional judgment to navigate not just legal, but also commercial, twists and turns. That, in one form or another, has always been what it means to be a lawyer.

Hence, the new frontier is not defined by technology but by human striving. Let us invest in ourselves, in our firms and in the next generation.

Let us recognise that even as we are today at the frontier of new debates of what it means to be human, for law, it must still mean a striving towards goodness, meaning and truth. These are the emblems of our profession. These are what make us fully human.

The writer is senior minister of state for law and transport

This is an adaptation of a speech delivered on Sep 9 at TechLaw Fest 2026, which was themed “From Foundation to Frontier: The Role of Law Amidst Change”