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In November, a law firm in Mongolia, where there aren't enough affordable lawyers available, launched an automated online platform that helps small and medium-sized companies with their employment law needs. The site is a solution to the country's lack of lawyer supply. Mongolia is one of the many regions in Asia trying to tackle access to law issues with technology as legal tech takes off in recent years.

Last year, local governments in China's remote Qinghai province deployed similar technology—in the form of real robots—to help answer rural residents' legal questions. In Hong Kong, law students developed a browser extension powered by machine learning that help local citizens find legislation relevant to their legal problems.

Meanwhile in the commercial law space, local law firms are driving the development, with automated legal search engines and document generators becoming more prevalent. In China, appellate and litigation specialist firm Tiantong Law Firm developed Itslaw.com, a data-driven platform that allows private practice and in-house lawyers to assess litigation and compliance risks in searching over 59 million court decisions and 1.5 million regulations. Han Kun Law Offices, best known for its private equity and venture capital practices, launched drafting platform Jianfabang to help early-stage startups generate legal documents at a lower cost.

In Korea, lawyer Rhim Young-yik developed AI-based legal search system U-Lex, and Korean firm DR & AJU last year became the first major commercial law firm to adopt it. In Japan, top firm Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu is using natural language processing technology to conduct contract review and due diligence.

Still, many of these efforts appear to be haphazard. Most of the Asian markets, perhaps with the exception of Singapore, lack the ecosystem to scale up their legal tech sector. According to Bloomberg data, disclosed funding raised by global legal tech startups in the third quarter this year hit a record $700 million, nearly all of which was raised by companies based in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The main restriction on legal tech development in Asia is the region's smaller legal market size. For example, China, which has the largest legal market in the region due to its sheer size, has a roughly $70 billion market. The U.S. legal market is six times that size. Another limitation on legal tech is local regulations. The legal services market is heavily regulated in many Asian jurisdictions, with a web of rules governing who can give legal advice.

In the Singapore Law Academy's 2019 State of Legal Innovation in Asia Pacific report, the authors of the Japan chapter argued that although a serious amount of legal innovation work is underway, it is not occurring in a coordinated fashion. If Japan wants to see greater growth in legal tech, they said, the nation's government, bar associations, lawyers, legal educators and legal tech vendors all need to come together and collaborate.

Similarly, the authors of the Korea chapter pointed to regulatory restrictions as reasons for the limited development of the nation's legal tech sector. Specifically, under Korean law, only licensed Korean lawyers are allowed to give legal advice. "When it comes to a machine-learning-based legal database which automatically finds legal issues for the users, the question of whether this service is in violation of [the law] would arise," the report said.

Perhaps others can borrow a page from Singapore's experiences. So far, Singapore has emerged as a formidable force in developing legal tech using a top-down, government-led approach. A concerted effort began in 2017 when the Singapore Law Academy released a five-year plan to help grow the legal sector's technology capability. Last year it launched Future Law Innovation Programme to organize law firms and startups to promote the use of technology in law. The city-state has also been successful in persuading large law firms to take the lead in adopting more tech-driven solutions. From the Magic Circle's Linklaters and Clifford Chance to major domestic firms Rajah & Tann and WongPartnership, AI-enabled programs are becoming the new normal.

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