Rajah & Tann partners with NUS on tech courses for lawyers
05 November 2021
Rajah & Tann and the National University of Singapore’s School of Computing (NUS Computing) have collaborated on a seven-course programme to equip lawyers with the skills to harness disruptive technologies shaping the future of law.
The courses include design thinking, financial technology, application programming interface, robotic process automation, business analytics and blockchain.
“We are preparing the next generation of lawyers,” said Rajesh Sreenivasan, head of R&T’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications practice. “This intensive and substantive training is a major step above courses where lawyers learn basic coding. We want our lawyers to rethink legal workflows and to use technology to enable change. This will allow our lawyers to re- engineer legal work and ultimately transform and digitalize practice workflows and client deliverables.”
This is the first time NUS has curated courses for a law firm. Sey Ming Ng, a partner at Rajah & Tan and a member of the firm’s Exco Technology Sub-Committee said the firm provided inputs for NUS and the result is a suite of courses with practical applications.
“After the training, our legal engineering and innovation team will work with our lawyers to actualize the design and process changes,” said Ng.
A total of 22 R&T participants from the firm’s Technology Interest Group completed the training. Keith Carter, an associate professor at NUS Computer and programme director, NUS FinTech Lab, said: “No field is exempted from the advancements of technology. Clients operate in a 24x7, virtual, digital world and they expect the same from the legal profession. During the programe, the lawyers learned how humans and AI work together and how fintech is the connector that will improve the workflow for maximum efficiency.”
Ng said the same course could also be used as part of the onboarding process of new lawyers joining R&T. The latest move by R&T to ensure that its lawyers are proficient in the use of technology is in line with a call from Chief Justice Sudaresh Menon, who in a 2019 speech, urged law firms to make such training “a priority” and not see it as an “optional extra.”
