Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon: Speech at the 39th LAWASIA Conference 2026

39TH LAWASIA CONFERENCE 2026 

"A Profession in Transition: Navigating Change, Sustaining Our Future"

16 September 2026

The Honourable the Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon

Supreme Court of Singapore

I. Introduction

1. It is a great pleasure and an honour for me to speak to you today on this plenary theme of “the Changing Nature of the Legal Profession”. The legal profession stands at a moment of profound transition. Generative artificial intelligence is changing not only how legal work is performed, but it is also affecting the economics, organisation and the delivery of legal services. These changes are unfolding against a wider question, which is whether legal practice is sustainable enough to attract, develop and retain the people on whom the profession and the justice system will continue to depend. I will consider these challenges in turn, before suggesting some tentative ideas on how we might shape this transition.

II. The Transformation of Legal Work and Professional Relationships

2. Generative AI is already pervasive in legal practice. It is being used for research, drafting, document review, due diligence, translation and knowledge management. Work that once took many hours can now be completed far more quickly, while capabilities that once depended on the availability of large teams may become available to much smaller ones equipped with the right technology.

3. The scale of investment reflects the promise of these tools. At the Legal Profession Symposium that was held in Singapore earlier this year, Professor David Wilkins pointed, for example, to Freshfields’ collaboration with Anthropic to develop AI-native workflows,¹ and to Kirkland’s announced commitment of US$500 million to develop AI models and solutions.² These developments carry at least three important implications in the near to medium term.

A. The changing economics of legal work

4. The first is that AI may reduce the number of lawyers needed to perform certain types of legal work, with consequences for the traditional business models adopted by most law firms. The tasks that are most readily automated, at the present time, are those performed by paralegals, trainees and junior associates. Firms may therefore find that they need to attract fewer lawyers in order to produce the same volume of work, and this could affect recruitment at the entry level, as smaller teams are tasked to handle larger workloads.

5. AI also weakens the traditional relationship between time, labour and price. If work can be done with fewer people and in less time, firms will have to reconsider how matters are staffed and priced. This presents a particular challenge to business models that have historically depended heavily on the billable hour. Firms will need to articulate their value more clearly, and pricing may increasingly need to reflect expertise, judgment, risk and value delivered, rather than simply time spent.

B. The changing division of legal work

6. A second, related implication is that more legal work may move in-house. As corporate legal departments deepen their own technological capabilities, routine contract review, compliance monitoring, initial drafts of advice and aspects of transaction management may increasingly be handled internally or through technology-enabled alternative service providers. We are already seeing examples of organisations reporting their reduced reliance on law firms through their use of AI.³

changed environment, both in-house and the external lawyers will need to reconsider how work should best be divided between them.

C. Uneven technological capability

8. A third implication is that the benefits of AI may be distributed unequally across the profession. Leading firms are investing heavily in proprietary systems, specialist talent, secure infrastructure and redesigned workflows. Competitive advantage may therefore depend increasingly not only on legal expertise, but also on data, systems and governance.

9. This could widen the gap between large law firms and institutions and smaller practices. Smaller firms may struggle to fund comparable systems and may instead have to rely on general-purpose tools that offer fewer safeguards for accuracy, confidentiality and proper data use.

10. The result could be a profession divided between a relatively small number of highly resourced firms paired with strong corporate legal departments, both having access to sophisticated technological capabilities, and smaller practices that find it increasingly difficult to compete. The International Bar Association has warned that uneven AI adoption may deepen existing market disparities, particularly where large firms are able to develop proprietary systems that their smaller counterparts just cannot match.⁴ This raises a concern, because smaller practices remain a vital gateway to legal services for many individuals and communities. If technological capacity and expertise become too concentrated, access to legal services may suffer.

III. The Sustainability of the Profession

A. Preserving the pathways for professional development

11. These developments raise a wider question: whether the profession can continue to attract, develop and retain enough lawyers with the competence, judgment and ethical commitment that are needed to serve clients, assist the courts and, in time, for them to become leaders of the profession and members of our judiciaries.

12. One long-term risk is that AI may erode important pathways for the training and development of junior lawyers. As I have noted, many of the tasks most susceptible to AI are precisely those through which junior lawyers have traditionally learnt their craft.⁵ Researching from first principles, reviewing documents, checking citations and producing imperfect first drafts may seem an inefficient alternative to a swift AI-generated answer. Yet it is by doing this work repeatedly that the senior colleagues in this room developed the habits of close analysis, sound judgment and professional instinct on which more sophisticated legal work could ultimately be done.

13. If these tasks disappear before junior lawyers have acquired those foundations, the consequences may extend beyond the individual lawyer. A lawyer who has not learned to research, analyse and draft independently may be less able to recognise when an apparently convincing AI-generated answer is incomplete or wrong. Over time, this could leave the profession with fewer lawyers able to undertake complex work, critically evaluate AI-assisted work, train those who come after them and eventually assume positions of leadership.

B. Attracting and retaining the next generation

14. But the challenge of sustaining the profession extends beyond AI. In Singapore, we have also been concerned about the number of young lawyers who are leaving, or considering leaving, the profession. I have previously identified at least five factors that may contribute to this phenomenon.⁶

15. These are not abstract concerns. The sustainability of legal practice is ultimately bound up with the sustainability of the justice system itself.

16. The adoption of AI and the sustainability of the profession give rise to distinct though closely connected concerns. If not managed carefully, AI may weaken training pathways and add to existing pressures on the workforce. And a profession that cannot retain and develop sufficient numbers of its members will be less able to develop the human expertise needed to evaluate and use technology responsibly.

IV. Shaping the Transition

17. How then, should we respond? I suggest five initial priorities.

18. First, lawyers must strive to develop genuine AI fluency. This goes beyond a basic knowledge of how to use these tools and extends to the ability to judge which tools are appropriate for which tasks; to understanding matters such as data provenance and the limitations of AI systems; and to the ability to recognise what AI can, cannot and should not be allowed to do.⁸

19. Second, we must be more deliberate about how junior lawyers are trained and developed. If AI removes or compresses the tasks through which juniors once learnt, we can no longer assume that such development will occur naturally in the ordinary course of work. Some foundational tasks should perhaps be required to be undertaken manually, or with limited AI assistance, because the skills they cultivate remain indispensable.⁹ A junior might, for example, be encouraged to first undertake an independent analysis, then compare it with an AI-generated answer and identify unsupported propositions, omissions and weaknesses. Needless to say, this will require a commitment from law firms to afford their young colleagues the time and space needed for this, but that should be seen as a critical investment in our collective future.

20. Third, the profession needs to rethink how legal work is organised and where its value lies. As in-house legal departments develop greater technological capability, in-house and external counsel need to have honest discussions to determine together which tasks are best performed internally, which require external expertise and which may appropriately be supported by technology. This need not be a zero-sum shift. Greater in-house capability may instead allow external counsel to concentrate on the work to which they can add the greatest value.¹⁰

21. This will also require us to reconsider how legal work is priced. If AI enables work to be completed more quickly and with fewer people, a model that equates value principally with hours may increasingly create the wrong incentives. This does not mean that hourly billing needs to be abandoned, but firms and clients should be willing to use a wider range of arrangements that better reflect the nature of the work. These might include fixed or capped fees where the work is sufficiently predictable, while retaining hourly charging where the nature of the work is such that the uncertainty is inherently greater. And clients are already pressing in this direction. A recent global survey found that 71% of in-house legal professionals expect their external law firms to change their commercial models, including how they charge for their services, as the use of AI increases.¹¹ And just two weeks ago, the Financial Times reported that major American financial institutions were pushing their external law firms to reduce their fees and share the gains achieved through the use of AI.¹²

22. Fourth, we should ensure that technological capability is not confined to a small segment of the profession. Smaller practices too should have reasonable access to safe and effective tools, together with the guidance, training and implementation support needed to use them well. The IBA has called for programmes directed specifically at smaller firms, including access to AI tools, training and financial incentives.¹³ In Singapore, initiatives such as the Legal Innovation and Future Readiness Transformation, or LIFT, seek to address the practical barriers faced especially by smaller practices in identifying, selecting and implementing appropriate technology.¹⁴ As technological capability becomes increasingly important to effective legal practice, we must strive to spread that capability sufficiently to safeguard the viability of the profession as a whole.