The Singapore Law Gazette

Flirting with a Modest AI Intervention for the Singapore Bar

Abstract

Senior practitioners within Singapore’s legal community have long admonished younger lawyers for a perceived want of perseverance, attributing their early departure from practice to individual failing rather than institutional cause. What changed in 2026 was the publication of the Law Society of Singapore’s four-year Legal Profession Sustainability Study¹Anthro Insights, The Legal Profession Sustainability Study (Report prepared for the Law Society of Singapore, June 2026)., a familiar and largely anecdotal complaint finally acquired an assiduous empirical foundation. The Ministry of Law acknowledged the Study’s findings in a statement released on 23 June 2026²Ministry of Law, Singapore, “Statement on ‘The Legal Profession Sustainability Study'” (23 June 2026) <https://www.mlaw.gov.sg/statement-on-the-legal-profession-sustainability-study/> accessed 7 July 2026.. This article undertakes a narrower and more speculative inquiry: could an AI-assisted counselling tool serve as an early, low-stigma point of entry for distressed or disengaged lawyers? The author argues that such a tool is genuinely feasible, but that this optimism must be heavily qualified, since no chatbot, however sophisticated, can alleviate the structural drivers of attrition – toxic workplace cultures, punitive billing models, and courtroom pressure.

Key words

1. Legal Profession, Lawyers
2. Attrition
3. Mental Health or Stress
4. AI or Artificial Intelligence
5. Counselling

Introduction

The attrition of lawyers from private practice, and indeed from the legal profession altogether, is a matter of grave systemic concern. The decision to leave a firm, however, is not synonymous with the decision to leave the profession; the two are distinct movements with distinct motivations, and any serious analysis must bifurcate the causes of one from the other.

What had previously rested on anecdotal evidence and informal commentary now rests on firmer empirical footing, following the Law Society of Singapore’s four-year Legal Profession Sustainability Study.³Anthro Insights, The Legal Profession Sustainability Study (Report prepared for The Law Society of Singapore, June 2026) at 1.

The Study was conducted by Anthro Insights and drew on 31 in-depth interviews with stakeholders, including former judges, academic leaders and practitioners, supplemented by 855 responses from practising and former lawyers. Its key inferences may be summarised as follows:⁴Anthro Insights, The Legal Profession Sustainability Study (Report prepared for The Law Society of Singapore, June 2026) at 2-3.

1. There is a distinction between the factors that cause lawyers to leave their firms, give up private practice, and abandon legal work altogether.
2. Firm culture is the bedrock of firm retention.
3. Mental health issues are a driver of lawyers leaving the profession.
4. Poor firm culture erodes mental health, which in turn contributes to attrition from the profession.
5. Current intervention programmes cannot fully address retention issues, since the underlying mental health issues persist unabated.
6. Changing workplace culture could stave off both firm-level and profession-level attrition.
7. Attributing attrition to generational weakness or a want of resilience is inaccurate; the issue is one of systemic structural deficiency.
8. Financial compensation carries less weight than firm culture and psychological well-being.

The Study goes on to propose that:⁵Anthro Insights, The Legal Profession Sustainability Study (Report prepared for The Law Society of Singapore, June 2026) at 3-4.

1. Interventions should be grounded in evidence-based practice.
2. Understanding the specific issues at play should take precedence over broad-based interventions, since one size does not fit all.
3. The Law Society and stakeholders should collaborate to address systemic problems, rather than leaving individual firms to act in isolation.
4. Early-career structures require foundational redesign. That includes rotations across practice areas, exposure to different supervisors, and delayed specialisation.
5. Law firms should review their training structures, and the Law Schools should revisit the goals of legal education in light of the advent of AI.
6. Mentorship from senior lawyers should be woven continuously into day-to-day work, rather than delivered as a standalone initiative.
7. Firms that excel at tracking financial health should apply the same assiduous rigour to tracking the mental health of their employees.

The Study concludes that addressing attrition requires:

1. Close collaboration among stakeholders.
2. Firms must take ownership of workplace culture.
3. Law Schools can inject realism about practice conditions and help students navigate future workplace dynamics.
4. Law Schools can redesign legal education for the age of AI.
5. The Judiciary and the Law Society must coordinate profession-wide responses.
6. The government can model sustainable practices and shape supportive regulatory policy.⁶Anthro Insights, The Legal Profession Sustainability Study (Report prepared for The Law Society of Singapore, June 2026) at 4.

Discussion

One cannot wait in desultory silence, in the face of these findings. The Government and the profession’s stakeholders are, on the available evidence, taking the Study very seriously and moving to address its findings.⁷Ministry of Law, Singapore, “Statement on ‘The Legal Profession Sustainability Study'” (23 June 2026) https://www.mlaw.gov.sg/statement-on-the-legal-profession-sustainability-study/ accessed 7 July 2026. That is laudable.

This article proceeds on the view that a serious response to attrition in the Singapore legal profession must begin with an accurate diagnosis of its causes, tested against credible primary research, before any solution, technological or otherwise, is proposed.

It proceeds, too, from the premise that AI-assisted counselling tools capable of low-stigma, scalable early engagement may have a role in a profession where help-seeking is frequently delayed by fear of career consequences.

As will be argued below, such tools are at best a complement to structural reform, not a substitute for it; to expect otherwise would be quixotic.

First, the granularity of the Study’s findings dispels the fallacy that individual resilience, personal failing, or generational weakness account for attrition from the profession.

Calling a spade a spade, what the Study in fact describes is job burnout.

Job burnout arguably attracts a disproportionate degree of media attention, owing to a public proclivity to romanticise the heroic, indestructible lawyer of film and television, clothed in justice and impervious to strain. The reality documented by the Study is considerably more sobering.

Burnout is a psychological syndrome of independent research significance, comprising three dimensions:⁸C Maslach, WB Schaufeli and MP Leiter, “Job Burnout” (2001) 52 Annual Review of Psychology 397, 402.

1. overwhelming exhaustion;
2. feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job; and
3. a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.

Burnout is not unique to lawyers. Singapore’s public primary healthcare workers face similarly acute conditions.⁹Tan PZ, Szücs A, Tan YY, Goh LH. Burnout in Singapore’s public primary healthcare workers: a cross-sectional study. BMC Prim Care. 2025 Dec 24;26(1):404. doi: 10.1186/s12875-025-03093-5. PMID: 41444937; PMCID: PMC12729091.

Research on doctors, nurses and allied health professionals found a positive association between emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation, both of which were in turn associated with an intention to resign.¹⁰Tan PZ, Szücs A, Tan YY, Goh LH. Burnout in Singapore’s public primary healthcare workers: a cross-sectional study. BMC Prim Care. 2025 Dec 24;26(1):404. doi: 10.1186/s12875-025-03093-5. PMID: 41444937; PMCID: PMC12729091 at p 9 of 13.

Depersonalisation is characterised, in that research, as unfeeling and impersonal responses towards recipients of one’s care. That is arguably a manifestation of the second key dimension of burnout.

That research further suggests a strong positive correlation between the first and second dimensions of burnout identified above, but none between the first and third, or the second and third.¹¹Tan PZ, Szücs A, Tan YY, Goh LH. Burnout in Singapore’s public primary healthcare workers: a cross-sectional study. BMC Prim Care. 2025 Dec 24;26(1):404. doi: 10.1186/s12875-025-03093-5. PMID: 41444937; PMCID: PMC12729091 at p 4 of 13.

Extrapolating cautiously from those findings, it may be postulated that reducing exhaustion could improve engagement. Whether the converse also holds, that improved engagement in turn reduces exhaustion, remains, on the present evidence, somewhat abstruse.

That is to say that the relationship may well be bidirectional, but the research reviewed here does not resolve the direction of causation, and this article does not claim otherwise.

Second, this postulate finds further support in burnout research from other jurisdictions. Burnout is prevalent well beyond Singapore’s legal profession, and well beyond Singapore itself. Comparable patterns have been documented among lawyers in France¹²Nickum M, Desrumaux P. Burnout among lawyers: effects of workload, latitude and mediation via engagement and over-engagement. Psychiatr Psychol Law. 2022 Apr 5;30(3):349-361. doi: 10.1080/13218719.2022.2035840. PMID: 37346056; PMCID: PMC10281412. and Greece.¹³Koukoulis AN, Theocharidou M, Kallergis EI, Kosta O, Papadodima S, Tsellou M. The Impact of Anxiety and Depressive Symptomatology on Greek Practicing Lawyers’ Self-Esteem. Healthcare (Basel). 2024 Dec 3;12(23):2428. doi: 10.3390/healthcare12232428. PMID: 39685050; PMCID: PMC11641485.

The research on Greek practising lawyers found that anxiety and depressive symptomatology significantly and negatively affect self-esteem, underscoring the importance of mental health support within the profession.¹⁴Koukoulis AN, Theocharidou M, Kallergis EI, Kosta O, Papadodima S, Tsellou M. The Impact of Anxiety and Depressive Symptomatology on Greek Practicing Lawyers’ Self-Esteem. Healthcare (Basel). 2024 Dec 3;12(23):2428. doi: 10.3390/healthcare12232428. PMID: 39685050; PMCID: PMC11641485. at p 11 of 15

The French research identified predictors of burnout in workload demands and decision latitude. The latter denoting a lawyer’s capacity to control his or her own work¹⁵Nickum M, Desrumaux P. Burnout among lawyers: effects of workload, latitude and mediation via engagement and over-engagement. Psychiatr Psychol Law. 2022 Apr 5;30(3):349-361. doi: 10.1080/13218719.2022.2035840. PMID: 37346056; PMCID: PMC10281412 at p 350. The research went on to examine more distinctively, how engagement, in particular, mediates the relationship between these demands, decision latitude and burnout.

Engagement is a psychological process comprising emotional (enthusiasm), behavioural (perseverance despite obstacles), and cognitive (a weighing of costs against benefits) dimensions, sustaining a person’s commitment to a course of action.¹⁶Nickum M, Desrumaux P. Burnout among lawyers: effects of workload, latitude and mediation via engagement and over-engagement. Psychiatr Psychol Law. 2022 Apr 5;30(3):349-361. doi: 10.1080/13218719.2022.2035840. PMID: 37346056; PMCID: PMC10281412 at p 351

Unsurprisingly, more engaged employees exhibit lower levels of burnout.¹⁷Nickum M, Desrumaux P. Burnout among lawyers: effects of workload, latitude and mediation via engagement and over-engagement. Psychiatr Psychol Law. 2022 Apr 5;30(3):349-361. doi: 10.1080/13218719.2022.2035840. PMID: 37346056; PMCID: PMC10281412 at p 351 Over-engagement, by contrast, describes a state in which work becomes the dominant interest in a person’s life, displacing other pursuits, neglecting one’s personal life, and sustaining a dogged persistence in work tasks¹⁸Nickum M, Desrumaux P. Burnout among lawyers: effects of workload, latitude and mediation via engagement and over-engagement. Psychiatr Psychol Law. 2022 Apr 5;30(3):349-361. doi: 10.1080/13218719.2022.2035840. PMID: 37346056; PMCID: PMC10281412 at p 351. Foreseeably, this is a condition that can debilitate health and precipitate burnout in its own right, and which should be distinguished from mere intensity of engagement.

In summary, the practical implications drawn from the French research include:¹⁹Nickum M, Desrumaux P. Burnout among lawyers: effects of workload, latitude and mediation via engagement and over-engagement. Psychiatr Psychol Law. 2022 Apr 5;30(3):349-361. doi: 10.1080/13218719.2022.2035840. PMID: 37346056; PMCID: PMC10281412 at pp 357-358

1. Engagement and over-engagement each directly influence burnout and are themselves affected by workload and decision latitude.
2. Employers should ensure that lawyers have resources sufficient to cope with their workload.
3. Employers should provide opportunities for greater decision latitude and social support.
4. Practices should be adopted to increase engagement among lawyers and their colleagues, fostering a healthier working environment.
5. Training or programmes to improve worker autonomy should be implemented.
6. Both employers and employees should be trained to understand what over-engagement entails.
7. Access to psychologists, together with training in self-efficacy and time and stress management, can help prevent the over-engagement that leads to burnout.

Third, and in relation to the second dimension of burnout identified above, engagement may be understood as existing along a spectrum running from over-engagement, through appropriate engagement, to detachment.

Over-engagement and detachment each carry negative consequences that feed into burnout, whereas appropriately calibrated engagement may help to reduce the first dimension of burnout – overwhelming exhaustion.

It is therefore proposed that one comparatively modest intervention, redolent of tools already developed for ambulatory psychiatric settings, might be an AI-assisted counselling tool. It can be repurposed as an early, low-stigma point of entry to assist distressed or disengaged lawyers.

Analysis of Potential AI Intervention

First, reconciling the Study’s findings with the architecture of burnout described above, the first dimension of burnout, exhaustion, is driven substantially by workload, billing culture, court pressures and client expectations. These are job demands requiring structural and organisational intervention and reform and lie outside the scope of this article.

Second, the proposal advanced here targets engagement, the second dimension of burnout, by seeking to alleviate the resource deficit underlying the job, specifically, deficits in supervision, mentorship, and psychological support. AI intervention may alleviate the situation.

The AI model proposed here would operate as follows:

1. An AI-assisted counselling chatbot tool²⁰See Mindline <https://mindline.sg/> accessed 14 July 2026, cited here only as an illustration of an existing low-stigma digital mental health entry point; no equivalence with the tool proposed in this article is intended. can be developed as a referral and low-stigma engagement mechanism within the legal profession, modelled on established clinical screening instruments such as the PHQ-9 and GAD-7.²¹For an example on the clinical tools, see Pranckeviciene A, Saudargiene A, Gecaite-Stonciene J, Liaugaudaite V, Griskova-Bulanova I, Simkute D, Naginiene R, Dainauskas LL, Ceidaite G, Burkauskas J. Validation of the patient health questionnaire-9 and the generalized anxiety disorder-7 in Lithuanian student sample. PLoS One. 2022 Jan 27;17(1):e0263027. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263027. PMID: 35085349; PMCID: PMC8794093.
2. The tool is intended to complement, not substitute for, the structural and organisational reforms needed to address the first dimension of burnout.
3. The tool can lower the threshold for a distressed individual’s first engagement with support, by offering anonymity, constant availability, and freedom from perceived judgement, bias or career risk.
4. The tool should provide information on burnout and coping strategies grounded in cognitive-behavioural principles.²²For an example of coping strategies involving cognitive behavioural principles, see Jin F, Ni S, Wang L. Occupational stress, coping strategies, and mental health among clinical nurses in hospitals: a mediation analysis. Front Public Health. 2025 May 2;13:1537120. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1537120. PMID: 40385623; PMCID: PMC12081339.
5. The tool should offer structured, reflective career guidance to help lawyers, especially junior lawyers, articulate their goals, identify the sources of their dissatisfaction, and connect that reflection to concrete resources offered by the Law Society, Singapore Academy of Law or the Law Schools.
6. The tool should perform a triage function, directing distressed lawyers towards appropriate human resources.
7. The tool does not replace clinical treatment, mentorship, or workplace structural reform.
8. The tool should sit outside the law firms’ own reporting lines, ideally hosted by the Law Society, Singapore Academy of Law or the Law Schools, so that the barrier of disclosing distress up a firm’s chain of command is removed.

This proposal is deliberately confined to triage, education and guidance rather than treatment. In essence, the AI tool will screen and refer, but it does not diagnose.

That limitation should mitigate the risks associated with using AI for psychotherapy proper²³Jesudason D, Bacchi S, Bastiampillai T. Artificial intelligence (AI) in psychotherapy: A challenging frontier. Australas Psychiatry. 2025 Aug;33(4):629-632. doi: 10.1177/10398562251346075. Epub 2025 May 27. PMID: 40421579; PMCID: PMC12314210., and should preserve the human factors, wisdom, trust, empathy and attachment. Those factors should remain central, and in some irreducible sense ineffable, to the therapeutic relationship.

Conclusion

Setting aside workplace culture, organisational structure and systemic factors, the principal predictor of attrition in the legal profession, on this analysis, is mental health.

There is presently no consistent or settled approach to managing attrition in the legal profession. What cannot be denied is that attrition is linked to mental health, and that its causes are a confluence of multiple, interlocking factors, such that present interventions remain, at best, reactive.

It is therefore suggested that, since AI-assisted programmes have already been used to expedite psychiatric triage with some success²⁴Stephenson C, Eadie J, Holmes C, Asadpour K, Gutierrez G, Kumar A, Jagayat J, Patel C, Sajid S, Knyahnytskyi O, Yang M, Reshetukha T, Moi C, Barrett T, Shirazi A, Verter V, Soares CN, Omrani M, Alavi N. Evaluation of an Artificial Intelligence and Online Psychotherapy Initiative to Improve Access and Efficiency in an Ambulatory Psychiatric Setting: Évaluation d’une initiative de psychothérapie en ligne basée sur l’intelligence artificielle visant à améliorer l’accès et l’efficacité en milieu psychiatrique ambulatoire. Can J Psychiatry. 2026 Jan;71(1):30-40. doi: 10.1177/07067437251355641. Epub 2025 Aug 1. PMID: 40746243; PMCID: PMC12316677., it is reasonable to conclude that a repurposed version of such a programme could function as a first responder for a distressed lawyer, young or otherwise.

Such an approach would be predictive, preventive, and scalable with manageable costs.

An AI-assisted counselling tool, properly grounded in clinical foundations, could plausibly improve the second dimension of burnout – engagement. If engagement improves, that should plausibly help to bolster the first key dimension of burnout— exhaustion.

The task facing the Law Society, Singapore Academy of Law and the Law Schools is an arduous one, though not an insuperable one.

If they are to protect both their members and the profession as a whole from the concomitant harms of attrition, the moment calls for a cogent and timely response, one that treats AI-assisted counselling not as a quixotic panacea, but as a modest, carefully bounded first step.

As the beacon beckons, may the Law Society, Singapore Academy of Law and the Law Schools hoist their trysails to take advantage of the zephyr of AI-assisted counselling and protect their charges and the profession as a whole from the ominous hull breach of attrition.