The Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) has unveiled a series of AI-powered upgrades to LawNet to help lawyers search across legislation, case law and legal commentary more efficiently.
The enhancements include expanded legislation coverage, AI-generated annotations for statutes, an upgraded digital library, an integrated sentencing research repository, and a partner application programming interface (API) for selected legal technology platforms.
LawNet’s enhanced legislation module, introduced last year with the Companies Act, now covers 10 pieces of legislation across civil procedure, criminal law and family law.
Users can view cases tagged to specific statutory provisions alongside the relevant statutory text, letting them locate related authorities more quickly.
The platform’s AI-generated annotated statutes feature currently covers the Companies Act. It extracts legal principles relevant to specific statutory provisions to help users identify the judgments most relevant to their research. A provisional patent application has been filed for the internally developed methodology, which scales to other Acts of Parliament and subsidiary legislation.
LawNet serves more than 75 per cent of practising lawyers in Singapore as their primary legal research resource.
“Legal research is becoming increasingly interconnected, but it must remain grounded in trusted and authoritative sources,” said Yeong Zee Kin (top), Chief Executive of SAL. “LawNet’s latest enhancements provide lawyers with a more seamless and efficient research experience, enabling them to navigate easily between statutory provisions, case law, and legal commentary.”
The upgraded Academy Library 2.0 provides access to 79 Academy Publishing titles within LawNet. Lawyers can search within individual titles, navigate chapters and view cited references alongside the text. They can also download selected pages as PDFs that retain print-edition pagination for citation and preparation of bundles and written submissions.
Academy Publishing titles will also be searchable alongside case law and legislation through LawNet’s classic search and AI-powered question-and-answer search. This lets users move from discussions in textbooks to relevant cases or statutory provisions without leaving the research workflow.
A revamped Sentencing Information and Research Repository is due to launch later this year. Phase one will let users search by legislation and statutory provision, while viewing sentencing charts, relevant cases, charge listings, and appeal records in one integrated view.
SAL is also piloting a LawNet partner API, which will allow selected legal technology platforms to integrate LawNet judgment content. Subscribers will be able to access the content through new or enhanced legal research tools.
“By integrating AI-powered capabilities, lawyers can more effectively identify relevant legal principles, authorities and research materials within a connected research ecosystem,” said Yeong.
He added that SAL remains committed to making LawNet “more accessible, relevant, and affordable for the profession, while preserving the trusted authority and reliability that lawyers depend on.”
Entelechy Asia 