Kuala Lumpur-based law firm Shang & Co announced this week that it has released the country's first AI legal assistant, specializing in labor law and legal advice for both employers and employees. Dubbed AskAILA, the application is trained in Malaysian labor law and related regulations, and is also capable of providing HR sample documents and checklists for compliance purposes.

“There is no trained AI in Asia that specialises in Labor Law, making AskAILA the first of its kind,” said Dato’ Chris Chin, Founding Partner of Shang & Co. “AskAILA aims to reduce procedural error committed by employers that may cost the company up to millions of ringgit in compensation.”

According to the firm, AskAILA is intended to provide much faster turnaround for legal and HR compliance-related inquiries at a “fraction of the cost” of traditionally provided legal advice. The firm is offering access to it at a fixed fee of RM268 (US$66) per month, significantly less than the cost of retaining a lawyer's services.

The release of such a service is timely, given the havoc that COVID-19 wreaked on the labor market in 2020 and the increased potential for legal disputes between employers and employees as a result.

AI legal assistants are not new—the world's first AI lawyer, IBM's “Ross” AI, was first put to work in a law firm in 2016, and the McKinsey Global Institute estimated in 2018 that 23 percent of a lawyer's job can be automated, possibly resulting in the elimination of positions that do primarily data gathering or document searching work. However, legal practitioners have also estimated that this might reduce overall legal costs by as much as a whopping 60-70 percent, making legal advice—including advice on employment disputes—significantly more accessible.

Image provided by Shang & Co