AI in Law: Will It Diminish Essential Legal Skills?
Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) launched a new Model Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance Framework for Agentic AI on February 12, 2026, aiming to address the unique risks posed by AI systems capable of independent action.
The framework, the first of its kind globally, provides organizations with a structured approach to managing the risks associated with agentic AI, which differs from traditional and generative AI in its capacity for autonomous decision-making. It focuses on four key dimensions: bounding risks, human accountability, technical controls and end-user responsibility.
Benjamin Cheong, a partner at Rajah & Tann Asia specializing in Technology, Media & Telecommunications, highlighted a potential downside to the increasing reliance on AI within the legal profession. He cautioned that the traditional “grunt operate” of legal research – meticulously examining case law and legal texts – plays a crucial role in developing a lawyer’s fundamental legal instincts. “When we did legal research (in the past), we would refer to law textbooks and read them thoroughly… As if you need to do research on a legal query, then you need to identify the legal issues relevant to the query, find the correct law textbooks, read and understand the law from these textbooks and then apply the law to your query in order to come up with a legal response,” Cheong explained.
Cheong elaborated that the process of navigating legal texts exposes lawyers to a broader range of legal concepts and arguments than a direct AI response would provide. “You will pick up different things along the way. This kind of thing is lost in an AI age, when you just receive a direct response to the query that you type into the AI platform. It becomes more tunnel-focused, so I suppose that’s the risk as well.”
However, Cheong acknowledged the current reality for new lawyers entering the profession, where AI is already an integral part of the legal landscape. He suggested that law firms can mitigate the potential loss of foundational training by encouraging junior lawyers to thoroughly analyze legal problems before utilizing AI for research and drafting, and to critically evaluate AI-generated outputs for accuracy and relevance. This approach, he argued, would reinforce rigorous research habits and an understanding of the interconnectedness of legal issues.
Melvin Loh, a senior lecturer of law at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), emphasized the competitive disadvantage of avoiding AI tools altogether. “You have these tools and mechanisms – with safeguards (around confidentiality, for example) in place – that can speed up your work in an accurate way, and not in a made-up, hallucinated way. I would think it’s a bit self-limiting if you don’t use it, because it will put you at a disadvantage compared to people who do.”
Kevan Wee, a third-year student in the computing and law program at Singapore Management University, echoed this sentiment, stating that while traditional legal tasks can be tedious, they instill valuable skills such as close reading, nuanced interpretation, and critical verification. Wee proposed redesigning legal education to incorporate AI as a tool while preserving the core elements of critical thinking and independent judgment. He suggested exercises like reconstructing arguments from primary sources before consulting AI summaries, or critiquing AI-generated drafts.
The IMDA’s framework aims to balance the transformative potential of agentic AI with the need for responsible deployment, focusing on bounding risks through careful use case selection and limitations on agent autonomy, ensuring human accountability through defined checkpoints for approval, implementing robust technical controls, and fostering end-user responsibility through transparency and training. The framework’s release follows a November 2025 announcement by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) regarding Project MindForge, an initiative to drive responsible generative AI innovation in the financial services sector.