WongPartnership is putting AI tools and training in front of the whole firm

Most law firms began their generative AI story the same way. Buy a licence, run a pilot with a keen practice group, count the logins. The firms now pulling ahead are asking a harder question, which is what happens when the tool has to reflect how the firm itself does the work. WongPartnership, one of Singapore's largest law firms, has been working on versions of that question for close to a decade. It adopted machine learning and document automation in 2017, became the first law firm in South East Asia to deploy Harvey and is piloting Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel as part of a wider collaboration on AI legal products.

From adoption to custom tools

The new step is a strategic partnership with August, a New York based AI platform for law firms that builds configurable agents and workflows with each firm and sends forward-deployed engineers to work alongside firm teams. WongPartnership is the first major firm in Singapore to partner with it. The firm will use the platform to build AI tools shaped by its own knowledge and practice methodologies, with August designing and delivering them alongside the firm.

Ng Wai King, Chairman and Senior Partner, described the aim as moving past adoption. "We now have the opportunity to drive AI impact at scale by customising AI solutions to align with how our lawyers do their work," he said. The goal, in his words, is services "that feel like an extension of our expertise rather than a bolt-on product."

Who is in the room

The detail worth noticing is the scope. The partnership is meant to bring AI tools and training across the entire organisation, for fee earners and non-fee earners alike. In many firms, the people who keep a matter moving (practice support, knowledge, finance and business development teams) are the last to get AI, even though a good share of the friction in legal work lives in their hands. Including them from the start changes what the training has to cover. A partner reviewing a draft needs different habits from a knowledge lawyer maintaining precedents or a finance team member chasing time entries.

Custom tools also raise the bar for the people who feed them. A tool built on a firm's practice methodology is only as good as the firm's ability to describe that methodology clearly: what a good first draft looks like, which checks a senior associate runs before anything goes to a client, where judgement overrides the template. That knowledge usually lives in people's heads, and forward-deployed engineers can only build what lawyers and staff are able to articulate.

What this means for L&D

For learning teams in professional services, the shift from off-the-shelf to custom AI moves training upstream. Teaching people to prompt a generic assistant is the easy part. The harder and more valuable part is helping fee earners and business services staff map their own workflows, define what good looks like and review what an agent produces against that standard. That is the work behind our AI Training programs, and it is the capability that decides whether a custom tool feels like an extension of the firm or just another login.

Sources:

• WongPartnership, 4 November 2026: WongPartnership selects August to build Custom AI