Singapore - 9 September 2026 (Wednesday) – Legora, the agentic operating system for legal professionals, and Singapore Management University (SMU) today announced that SMU’s Yong Pung How School of Law is joining Legora's Legal AI Scholars Program, becoming the first university in Asia to do so.
Under the partnership, SMU's law faculty will receive licenses and training on the platform, with access expanding to students and courses as SMU integrates Legora into its teaching.
SMU joins a growing community of Legal AI Scholars Program institutions that includes Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, Cornell Law School, the University of Texas School of Law, Boston University School of Law, and the University of San Francisco School of Law.
SMU Yong Pung How School of Law, established in 2007 and renamed in 2021 in honour of former Chief Justice Yong Pung How, has built a substantial track record at the intersection of law and technology. In 2023, it introduced a law and technology track, offering students cross-disciplinary study of the legal and regulatory issues raised by emerging technologies.
The following year, it launched the Centre for Digital Law which integrates research expertise across law, computer science and digital humanities. In 2025, it announced a three-year project to develop Singapore’s first open empirical legal database in 2025, with the support of Singapore’s Ministry of Law, to strengthen Singapore’s legal data infrastructure for the digital age. Most recently in June 2026, the School hosted the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Law for the first time in Asia.
This partnership extends that trajectory into the classroom, giving faculty access to the agentic AI tools now shaping legal practice. On Legora, lawyers direct AI agents through the work itself, including legal research, reviewing documents at scale and drafting, meaning students learn the platform the way lawyers use it in practice.
“Technology literacy is already embedded across SMU’s programmes, this partnership deepens the integration of AI competencies specifically within legal education. Our students will practise law in a profession where AI is not optional but foundational; at the same time, we have introduced safeguards to preserve the rigorous development of foundational legal skills and to cultivate the sound and ethical judgement that will remain a distinctive human value-add to the profession. We are pleased to partner Legora as we work through what this shift means for how lawyers are trained," said Professor Lee Pey Woan, Dean of SMU Yong Pung How School of Law.
Through the Legal AI Scholars Program, students and faculty train on the same platform used by leading law firms for research, review and drafting across complex matters. This means graduates arrive in practice already proficient in the tools shaping the profession. Partner schools receive purpose-built guides, training videos and use-case-specific training sessions.
Legora's dedicated team also works directly with faculty to embed AI exercises and assignments into existing courses, building proficiency in the classroom rather than leaving it to on-the-job learning. At SMU, faculty will be onboarded first, with training delivered by Legora's Asia-Pacific legal engineering team and SMU Libraries, before access widens course by course as the faculty identifies where the platform best supports its teaching.
“The lawyers graduating now will spend their entire careers working alongside AI, and the gap between schools that prepare them for that and schools that don't is going to show up quickly in practice. SMU understood this and now sits at the centre of how the next generation of lawyers will be trained. Their graduates will arrive in practice already fluent in the tools their firms are using, and that head start compounds over a career,” said Heather Paterson, VP of Legora APJ.
The announcement comes as Legora deepens its presence in Asia-Pacific, with offices in Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul and Bengaluru.
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