What TechLaw.Fest revealed about the ecosystem

"AI slop is becoming a real problem."

One GC said plainly that she was seeing AI-generated material coming from her own team, from business stakeholders and from external counsel. The concern went beyond accuracy. The ease of producing polished-looking work was beginning to raise questions about whether the thinking behind it was becoming weaker.

The comment stayed with me because it captured where the legal AI conversation seems to be heading. Much of the early discussion around generative AI focused on capability, particularly what it could draft, summarise or automate. At the Singapore-based conference, now in its 11th edition, the more interesting conversations were about judgement, quality, adoption and where lawyers were choosing to draw the line.

Across the conference, the same sense of maturity appeared in different ways.

The expo floor had the global names you would expect, alongside established document management providers and the newer wave of AI companies competing for legal budgets.

What interested me most were companies from markets like Korea that are already significant at home but relatively unfamiliar internationally. Some of the products we saw had clearly been developed over years of working with lawyers, with use cases built around specific workflows rather than whichever technology happened to be receiving attention at the time.

The depth of those products was hard to miss. Years of iteration, customer feedback and use in local markets had shaped both the design and the problems they chose to solve. Some newer entrants to legal tech could learn as much from studying these established products as they can from looking at the latest AI launch.

The exhibition also went well beyond software. Legal transformation providers and legal design practitioners had a visible presence, which gave a broader view of the different people now involved in how legal teams think about technology and change.

One of my favourite discussions focused on how legal professionals were actually using AI in their work. Two panellists who were significant AI users remained cautious about relying on it for substantive legal drafting. Their use was concentrated around comparative analysis, research, synthesis and other tasks surrounding the legal work.

It was an interesting contrast to much of the legal AI conversation, which still focuses on what these systems can produce. Experienced users appear to be asking more practical questions. How much time is saved once review is included? Which tasks benefit from speed without creating additional risk? Where does judgement matter enough for the efficiency gain to become marginal?

Agentic AI was also a major topic across the conference and one that is likely to have a strong future in legal as the technology moves beyond individual prompts towards more connected workflows.

Responsible AI came up alongside this. Governance frameworks are being developed while the limits of these systems are still being tested through actual use. Some assumptions being made today around appropriate use, risk and reliability may look different after firms and legal departments have several more years of operating experience. Solidifying too many presumptions before they have been properly tested could create its own problems.

I had the opportunity to speak on “India: The Legal AI Sleeping Giant Stirs”, where we discussed some of the characteristics shaping the Indian market. The panel included Brian Tang (Founding Executive Director, LITE Lab@HKU), Dipti Sharma (Head, Legal Technology, Trilegal), Rohit Shukla (Chief Digital Officer, Khaitan & Co.).

Price sensitivity remains a significant factor, as it does across several parts of Asia. Legal operations is also still relatively underdeveloped as a formal function, which affects how technology is evaluated, bought and implemented. India adds another level of complexity through the range of organisations, workflows, languages and levels of technology maturity that products need to accommodate.

The larger weakness is the support system around those companies.

Singapore offers a useful contrast. Government and public institutions have spent years supporting legal innovation and encouraging technology adoption. Local products also have a better chance of finding local customers, which gives companies an opportunity to test, refine and build credibility in their home market.

India has a growing number of legal technology companies, more interest from law firms and legal departments and greater investor attention than it had a few years ago. Institutional support has not developed at the same pace. Structured opportunities to work with institutions remain limited, public support specifically directed towards legal innovation is scarce and domestic adoption is still difficult for many companies.

My second panel, “Global: LegalTech Associations Around the World Unite!”, gave the Indian LegalTech Network an opportunity to represent India alongside legal tech organisations from other markets. The panel included Paul Neo (Assistant Chief Executive at Singapore Academy of Law), Daniel Marques (Director, AB2L), and Brian Tang (Founding Executive Director, LITE Lab@HKU).

An important part of our contribution was framing what the Indian market actually looks like. From the outside, India can appear to be one very large legal market. In practice, it contains several distinct market segments with different buyers, price points, workflows and levels of technology maturity. Large law firms, corporate legal departments, mid-sized practices, boutiques and smaller firms cannot be approached as though they form a single customer base.

Understanding those distinctions becomes important when discussing how Indian legal technology companies can scale. It also changes how we think about standardisation. Legal practice will differ across organisations and jurisdictions, but products cannot scale if every implementation starts from scratch. Companies need to identify which parts of a workflow can be standardised while still allowing for the differences that genuinely matter.

The position of legal operations also varies considerably across those segments. In some organisations it is becoming a clearer function; in others, technology and process decisions are still distributed across different teams. Companies need to understand where those responsibilities sit rather than assume there is a uniform buying structure.

Enterprise governance is another area that will become increasingly important. Once a legal technology product enters a large organisation, security, data governance, procurement, technology architecture and internal risk frameworks all influence whether it gets adopted. Companies selling into enterprise environments need to account for those expectations much earlier in how they build and position their products.

Legal tech associations can help by sharing what different markets are learning about these issues and by giving companies better access to local context and practical information about how markets operate. The value is in making some of that knowledge easier to access rather than leaving every company to work it out independently.

The Indian Legal Tech Network, along with Justice Adda, first ran Fail Camp for startups. The idea was to create a space where founders could speak openly about what had gone wrong rather than presenting another polished story about what had worked.

We took a version of the format and rebuilt it for LegalTechTalk in London in June this year, focusing on legal operations, practice management and people involved in legal technology implementations. We then brought it to Singapore.

The discussion was remarkably candid. Over-engineering came up repeatedly. Teams had built sophisticated solutions before properly understanding the problem. Others had designed around what was technically possible rather than what users actually needed. Several examples involved technology that worked perfectly well but failed because the people behind it had misunderstood how decisions were made inside the organisation.

Misreading stakeholder incentives and buyer personas was another recurring theme. Legal technology rarely has one straightforward buyer, and projects can stall when teams understand the user but fail to understand everyone else involved in getting the technology approved and implemented.

The legal tech sector has plenty of case studies explaining why something worked. The candour at Fail Camp was a reminder of how much can also be learnt from implementations that did not.

One of the major announcements at TechLaw.Fest concerned the future of the conference itself. The Singapore Academy of Law and Law.com announced a partnership that will see TechLaw.Fest become part of the inaugural LegalWeek Asia in September 2027.

The announcement matters beyond the conference calendar. LegalWeek has become an established part of the global legal technology conversation, and bringing the format to Asia around an existing Singapore platform reflects the growing importance of the region within that conversation.

It also felt consistent with what was visible across TechLaw.Fest. The Asian legal technology market has developed enough depth for the global industry to pay closer attention to what is being built, bought and implemented here.

Indian legal technology has traditionally looked towards the US and UK when thinking about international expansion. Both remain important, but TechLaw.Fest reinforced the amount of activity taking place much closer to home.

Asian legal markets are developing sophisticated products, experimenting seriously with AI and building their own approaches to legal innovation. Some are also showing what stronger institutional support and local adoption can do for domestic technology companies.

For the Indian LegalTech Network, being part of these conversations gives us an opportunity to represent what is developing in India while learning from how other ecosystems are approaching similar questions. Stronger relationships across the region can make the Indian ecosystem more visible and give companies here a better understanding of the markets around them.

There is also a lesson to bring home. India can continue producing strong legal technology companies, but the ecosystem around them needs to develop with the same ambition. Companies should have a meaningful opportunity to build credibility with customers at home before international expansion becomes the only obvious route to scale.

TechLaw.Fest left me thinking as much about what India needs to build at home as where Indian legal tech can go next.

Authored by Vaishali Gopal, Senior Advisor, Indian LegalTech Network.