Get Inspired! Tech Adoption Journey from Fellow Law Practices
Adopting Legal Tech at Focus Law Asia: A Boutique Firm’s Perspective on Document Management and Cyber Security
As a boutique law firm with around 40 members, including lawyers and administrative staff, Focus Law Asia recognises that technology is not a luxury but a necessity. With a strong Korea and Japan Desk, much of its work involves cross-border collaboration and international disputes, requiring systems that are simple, secure, and accessible globally.
The law firm’s adoption of legal technology has been guided by a clear focus on making document management seamless while protecting both the firm and its clients against cyber security risks. Mr Adrian Choo and his team at AVBT, have supported the law firm since its inception, recommending the solutions that now form the backbone of its practice and providing the expertise to implement them smoothly.
In this Q&A, Focus Law Asia shares how adopting legal technology has improved document management, cybersecurity, and cross-border collaboration while emphasising practical advice for other firms on choosing the right tools and ensuring efficiency and client data protection.
What legal tech solutions has your firm adopted, and what led to this decision?
For document and matter management, we adopted Microsoft SharePoint integrated with Microsoft Outlook and Teams. This decision was driven by the need for a single, unified system that all members of the law firm — lawyers, paralegals, and administrative staff — could use intuitively. We experimented with other solutions in the past, but SharePoint proved to be the simplest, most user-friendly, and most adaptable platform for our needs.
From a cyber-security standpoint, we implemented a layered approach. This includes:
- Barracuda for phishing and email threat protection, which provides real-time alerts and quarantines suspicious messages.
- Microsoft 365 Advanced Security, which enables remote wipe capability where our IT service provider, AVBT can remotely access our individual computers to solve any issues.
- A firm-wide emphasis on vigilance, where designated team members monitor flagged communications daily to ensure that legitimate emails are not lost in the filtering process.
For a law firm of our size, efficiency and security must go hand in hand. With lawyers frequently traveling overseas for hearings, conferences, and client meetings, we needed to ensure that our documents are instantly accessible — without compromising confidentiality. These solutions allowed us to achieve exactly that.
How did you evaluate and choose the right solution for your law firm?
We owe much of our successful adoption to Adrian Choo and AVBT. From the inception of our firm, Adrian and his team understood that while we may not be the largest firm, our cross-border focus required a high standard of digital infrastructure. He guided us through the decision-making process by recommending solutions that balanced simplicity with robustness.
For example, while some legal tech platforms are tailored specifically for large firms, their complexity and cost can become barriers for mid-sized or boutique practices. Adrian steered us towards Microsoft SharePoint because it was powerful yet familiar to our team, making adoption significantly easier. Similarly, for cyber security, he highlighted solutions that not only protected us but could be actively monitored and maintained without straining internal resources.
The key was not to chase every new product on the market, but to identify what would best fit our law firm’s size, practice, and budget.
What benefits have you seen since adopting legal tech?
The benefits have been both practical and strategic:
- Efficiency in document management: SharePoint has streamlined the way we store, access, and share documents. Lawyers working on cross-border matters can collaborate on the same set of documents in real time, avoiding duplication and confusion.
- Flexibility and mobility: Because we travel frequently, being able to access documents securely from anywhere is invaluable. Whether in Singapore, Seoul, or Tokyo, our lawyers can log into the system and immediately access the information they need.
- Enhanced security: With Barracuda and Microsoft 365’s advanced security, our law firm has so far been fortunate not to encounter any major cyber incidents. But we see this not as luck but as the result of proactive investment in strong defences.
- Peace of mind: Both our lawyers and our clients have confidence that sensitive information is safeguarded. This is increasingly important as clients demand not only legal expertise but also assurance that their data is being responsibly managed.
What were your biggest challenges during implementation, and how did you overcome them?
The most significant challenge was migrating files from our old system to the current Microsoft SharePoint environment. File migration always carries risks — missing documents, broken folder structures, or lost metadata. However, Adrian and his team at AVBT made the process seamless. They carefully planned the migration, tested the process on smaller data sets, and ensured that nothing was lost in transition.
Another challenge was user adoption. Any change to the way documents are managed inevitably requires lawyers and staff to adjust their habits. We overcame this through training sessions and by emphasizing the benefits—ease of use, accessibility, and security. Once our team saw how much easier it was to collaborate and retrieve files, adoption was natural.
What advice would you give to other firms exploring legal tech options?
Our advice can be summed up in three points:
- Prioritise cyber security immediately. Too often, law firms wait until after an incident to act. Implement solutions such as Barracuda or similar phishing defences now. Even smaller law firms are not immune to attacks, and the cost of prevention is far lower than the cost of remediation.
- Designate responsibility within the law firm. Legal tech cannot run on autopilot. At Focus Law Asia, one person is designated to check flagged emails daily, ensure legitimate communications are not lost, and alert the entire law firm if a threat is detected. This small daily practice makes a huge difference.
- Seek expert guidance. Partnering with an IT service provider who understands both the technology and the specific needs of law firms is invaluable. Adrian Choo and AVBT have been our trusted partners, ensuring we don’t just adopt technology for the sake of it, but select the right tools for our practice.
Conclusion
Adopting legal technology is no longer optional for law firms — it is fundamental to practice management and client service. At Focus Law Asia, our experience shows that even a boutique law firm can achieve high levels of efficiency and cyber resilience with the right tools and the right partners.
Our journey has been shaped by a clear vision: to integrate technology in a way that supports our lawyers, protects our clients, and enhances our ability to work across borders. While technology will continue to evolve, our guiding principle remains the same—simplicity, security, and adaptability.
And for that, we thank Adrian Choo and AVBT for being our trusted advisors every step of the way.
Evolving with Legal Tech: Covenant Chambers LLC’s Journey from Practice Management to Generative AI
Covenant Chambers LLC began its legal tech journey by adopting core systems such as a Practice Management System (PMS) and a Document Management System (DMS). Since then, it has incorporated more advanced AI-powered solutions into its workflow.
In this Q&A, Covenant Chambers LLC shares its experience, from the motivations behind key tech decisions to the challenges of implementation, and reflects on the lessons learnt as it continues to embrace innovation in legal practice.
What legal tech solutions has your firm adopted, and what led to this decision?
Our firm has adopted two key legal tech solutions: a robust PMS and a powerful cloud-based DMS.
Our PMS is the backbone of our legal operations. We transitioned to it around 2016, opting for a simpler, more cost-effective system with all the key functions that fit our specific use case. It provides various dashboards and modules that allow our lawyers to conveniently track their matters and billable hours, automates the accounting of invoicing our clients and monitoring of payments, and gives us an overview of our firm’s performance at a glance. The system also provides for certain data analytics and insights, which enable our firm’s management to strategise, plan, budget, and assess with greater accuracy.
Our DMS is a cloud-based solution that integrates office productivity tools, document management, and collaboration capabilities within its environment. A key feature is the automatic optical character recognition (OCR) of all the documents in the cloud drive, which makes scanned documents searchable and is especially useful when browsing voluminous documents. The system also features powerful Boolean and natural language search capabilities within the firm’s documents, which allow our lawyers to quickly locate specific information within our repository of documents and precedents, saving valuable time and effort in our workflow. The integrated AI function allows us to summarise documents, generate timelines of events, and provides data analytics and insights.
In addition to our core systems, we rely on professional document management applications to handle substantial documents with a high degree of precision. These specialised applications are essential for tasks such as bundling and manipulating large documents, as they provide features like redactions, indexing, cross-references, and hyperlinks. One of the biggest game-changers has been bulk OCR processing. Instead of manually searching through stacks of scanned documents, we can now make entire archives fully searchable in minutes. The ability to convert document file formats with automatic file-naming and indexing further streamlines our workflow, enabling the easy and accurate preparation of lists of documents.
With AI at the forefront of technological advancement, we are actively exploring the potential of generative AI to further optimise our workflows. Our firm has settled on a GenAI LLM system because it supports multimodal understanding, allowing for different kinds of inputs such as documents and images, and demonstrates exceptional reasoning abilities. Currently, it is best used for initial document reviews, document comparisons, summarising attendance notes into updates, contract amendments or drafting and other non-legal tasks.
We are also utilising an AI summarising system which functions within the framework of our own uploaded material. The AI becomes an expert on the subject matter we upload, providing insights, summaries with pin cite references, and Q&A responses. We find this particularly suitable in the legal context due to its excellent source-grounding capabilities, which means it does not hallucinate and will not scout for other data available on the web beyond our own uploaded documents.
How did you evaluate and choose the right solution for your law firm?
Our approach to selecting legal tech solutions is grounded in a thorough cost-benefit analysis. We do not just look at the initial price tag; we consider the long-term value, including potential cost savings from increased efficiency, and the benefits of streamlined workflows and enhanced productivity.
Another consideration was finding solutions that are best use cases for current and projected needs. We worked closely with legal software consultants to find and implement legal tech solutions best suited for our firm. This careful evaluation ensures that we choose tools that not only fit our budget but also deliver a strong return on investment and are scalable for future requirements.
What benefits have you seen since adopting legal tech?
The adoption of legal tech has delivered several significant benefits to our firm and, by extension, to our clients.
Firstly, our PMS has accelerated our invoicing. The automation of billing and accounting tasks means we can generate and send invoices to clients much faster, which has a positive impact on our clients’ experience.
Secondly, our cloud-based DMS allows our lawyers to access documents and collaborate on files from any location, which enables faster response times, flexible work practices, and a better work-life balance for our staff.
Lastly, with streamlined processes and a more efficient workflow, our firm will undoubtedly experience increased productivity in our operations. By using AI to summarise documents, lawyers can ingest and retrieve the information they need faster. This not only results in time savings for our lawyers but also translates into tangible cost efficiencies and savings for our clients.
What were your biggest challenges during implementation, and how did you overcome them?
The implementation of new technology is rarely without its hurdles. For us, the biggest challenges were data security concerns, user training, and shifting our firm’s culture and practices.
Transitioning to cloud-based solutions brought up understandable concerns about the security of our sensitive client data. We overcame this by conducting a rigorous review of the security measures taken by our service providers. This included scrutinising their encryption protocols, data handling policies, and compliance with industry standards to ensure that our clients’ information is protected to the highest standards.
Implementing new technology requires a firm-wide adoption. We tackled the learning curve through demonstrations and on-the-job training, ensuring that our team members became comfortable and proficient with the new systems in their day-to-day work.
The most significant challenge involved our culture and practices: our lawyers and staff had to learn, deviate from past practices or habits and adopt tech-first practices. This required consistent communication and demonstrating the tangible benefits of the new technologies.
What’s next in your legal tech journey? Are there any tools or trends you’re currently exploring?
Looking ahead, our focus is on leveraging the power of generative AI for even more use cases. We are actively exploring more efficient, streamlined, and effective AI-powered applications for due diligence, document review, and discovery and bundling.
Our legal tech journey is a continuous process of evolution and adaptation. As a tech-driven firm, we are committed to exploring and adopting new solutions that not only increase our efficiency but also allow us to deliver a higher quality of service to our clients.
