Homegrown startup, Legalese, partners with Singapore Management University to make computational law a reality
Download the joint press release with SMU
Legalese, an opensource startup aiming to replace contract-drafting lawyers with contract-drafting software, is collaborating with the Singapore Management University (SMU) in the University's just announced Research Programme in Computational Law ("Programme"). Legalese co-founders, Wong Meng Weng and Alexis Chun, have joined the SMU School of Law and will participate in the Programme as its Principal Investigator and Industry Director, respectively. Legalese, as an industry collaborator with the Programme will look to commercialise and build upon the opensource technologies researched and developed under the Programme. The Programme will be housed under SMU School of Law's newly-established Centre for Computational Law (CCLAW), which is helmed by SMU's Professor Lim How Khang, who is, impressively, both a computer scientist and a (former) lawyer.
The Programme is the keystone of a major S$15M grant awarded by the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF) to SMU. The Programme will research and develop open source technologies for 'smart' contracts and 'smart' statutes, starting with the design and implementation of a domain-specific programming language (DSL) that allows for contracts, laws, rules, and business process logic – basically, everything that makes up "law" – to be expressed in code. This paves the way for 'smart' contracts and statutes that can be reliably executed by computers to enable precise and accurate performance and compliance. The eventual industry-adoption of the DSL will facilitate the delivery of more efficient legal and regulatory services through digital systems, and will broaden access to justice.
Software is eating law
Whilst the contributions of the legally-trained are key to the Programme's success, the co-founders of Legalese are not shy in emphasising the importance of software, technology, and computer scientists in the effort.
Wong:
"Marc Andreessen says, "software is eating the world". Let's unpack that industry by industry: Blueprints used to be done on paper. Software eats engineering. Who is the category leader in computational 3D design? Autodesk. Accounting used to be done on paper with ledgers. Software eats accounting. Who is the category leader in computational accounting? Intuit, Xero. Graphic design, photography, and illustration used to be done on paper, in the darkroom, with pencil and ink. Software eats the creative department. Who is the category leader in computational creative? Adobe. Now, software is eating law."
Chun:
"If you showed a cartographer an iphone 15 years ago and asked them how they might use it to transform their industry, it is likely that they would conceive of a world where every single map can be uploaded and viewed on the iphone. That's good, but what they might not be able to imagine is what Google Maps / Apple Maps does today – not just a high-resolution version of a paper map in digital form, but functionalities in the map that tells one when they need to leave, when routes should be redirected, or just simply, where one is on the map! In terms of LegalTech, lawyers today are very much like the skilled cartographer, excited about PHP on a page. And as a (recovering) lawyer, I very much sympathise with the existential crisis possibly triggered by that. Of course, it's marvellous that there is this explosion of LegalTech solutions; the same way it's great that we can now get many restaurants' menus on their websites. But that's quite different from harnessing the power of software and technology to supercharge a domain. A DSL-for-law, we think, is the foundational technology to do that. Frederik Pohl talks about how a good sci-fi story ought to predict not just the automobile, but the traffic jam. We couldn't agree more and it is a tremendous testament to the foresight and innovative mindset of both Singapore and SMU that we are all aligned and engaged in this ambitious effort to make law computational".
More Information
Legalese: http://legalese.com/
The SMU Centre for Computational Law (CCLAW): https://cclaw.smu.edu.sg/
About Legalese
Legalese is a homegrown, deep-tech startup in the computational law space founded by a recovering lawyer (Alexis) and a computer scientist who designed the anti-spam standard for emails still used today (Meng). They want to apply computer science to law: from contract drafting, generation, and management, to all the quasi-legal rules, business process logic, and statutes that altogether make up "law". They aim to do that by first developing a domain-specific language (DSL) for law; the working title of this language is L4. This is the R&D arm of Legalese. Parallel to this, Legalese's product arm just launched its first web-app on fundraising paperwork, and API and white-label offerings for document automation and generation. In a few years, the two tracks will dovetail.
About Wong Meng Weng
Wong Meng Weng is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and technologist, specializing in deep-tech Internet infrastructure and open-source startups. As an undergraduate in the US, Meng co-founded pobox.com, the first commercial email service, later acquired by Fastmail. In terms of creating and leading a technology to worldwide adoption, Meng has done that as early as 15 years ago when he designed the Sender Policy Framework (RFC4408), an anti-spam email standard that was later embraced and extended by Microsoft. On top of creating and designing the framework, Meng championed and led it to its worldwide adoption, including by Microsoft and Google. Today SPF protects a majority of all email. As of August 2006, between one-third and one-half of legitimate email volume worldwide carries an SPF record. In 2005, Meng also co-founded karmasphere.com, one of the first big data analytics solutions to deliver internet-scale "reputation data as a service". This evolved to offer Big Data tools and was acquired by FICO. Upon returning to Singapore for family reasons, Meng joined BANSEA (the local angel association) and TIE.org, started investing $50k–$1M in seed deals, and he co-founded the Singapore Hackerspace, and the first startup accelerator in Southeast Asia, JFDI.Asia.
As one of Tim O'Reilly's alpha geeks and a co-founder of Hackerspace.SG, Meng is active in organising and contributing to the startup ecosystem (Startup Weekend, TEDx, Barcamp, Startup Grind, FOSSAsia). Meng occasionally mentors at the Founder Institute and is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD Business School.
As the co-founder of Legalese, he has held fellowships at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, at Ca'Foscari University of Venice (researching computational linguistics), and at the CodeX Center for Legal Informatics at Stanford University. Meng earned his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania (SEAS '97), and was the country delegate to MIT's Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program ('14 – '16). Meng has also been previously appointed to the CFE sub-committee on Future Corporate Capabilities and Innovation.
About Alexis Chun
Alexis describes herself as a recovering lawyer, UI/UX designer, project consultant, and self-taught programmer. In her previous life, Alexis was a dispute resolution, technology, and IP lawyer in Rajah & Tann, one of the largest transnational law firms in Asia. Handling both corporate advisory and commercial litigation, Alexis represented corporations on IT, IP, and commercial matters in court, advised on complex mergers and acquisitions, and was seconded to international banks to advise on Asia-Pacific regulatory compliance, financial products, and global risk management. As an ad-hoc consultant, she has been engaged to negotiate on corporate restructurings, data analytics, and international SaaS contracts in both English and Mandarin.
Alexis is an advocate and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore and obtained her Bachelor of Laws (Second Upper with Honours) from Queen Mary, University of London (2011), and was a 2008 recipient of the Long Vacation Scholarship from Cambridge University. She enjoys long walks listening to A16Z podcasts and Belle & Sebastian, and spends her "free" time on Waitbutwhy and computer games. She is heavily influenced by science fiction (Neal Stephenson, Asimov, His Dark Materials, Iain M. Banks), and when she grows up, she'd like to be Tina Fey.