The latest addition to a lawyer’s productivity toolkit — SideKick
Lawyers today face a rapidly changing and overwhelmingly complex legislative environment. Not only do legislative and regulatory developments occur more frequently, increased regulatory scrutiny has also heightened clients’ expectations of lawyers being on top of the complex landscape.
With statutes containing hundreds of sections, and each section supplemented by various subsidiary legislations and guidance from regulatory bodies, it can be time-consuming to navigate this legislative landscape. INTELLLEX recognizes that these inefficiencies are hampering the productivity of lawyers. Therefore, INTELLLEX has constructed a new research tool — SideKick — that promises to minimize the amount of time consumed by rudimentary research, so that lawyers can focus on more meaningful tasks.
1. What is INTELLLEX SideKick?
SideKick is a toolbar that integrates seamlessly into your browsing of any statute* on Singapore Statutes Online (SSO). It adds two key benefits to your current research process — context and efficiency.
SideKick automatically picks up the referenced sub-sections that provide further context on definitions, explanations and exemptions to each provision. It also shows you which regulatory Guidance, Notices, Consultation Papers, FAQs and forms have mentioned the specific provision.
SideKick also optimizes your statutory research process by combining and automating the previously separate steps of cross-referencing statutes, subsidiary legislation and regulatory materials into a single click. The convenience of having SideKick directly on SSO helps users avoid the tedium and distraction of running supplementary searches on different sites. Coupled with contextual browsing, SideKick ensures that the time you spend reading is effective, ultimately maximizing your efficiency.
*As of Feb 2021, we have launched the free-to-use beta for Securities and Futures Act of Singapore only
2. How does SideKick compare to traditional research methodologies?
Unlike the traditional method, where one has to manually cross-reference the information obtained at each step, SideKick aggregates all the necessary knowledge onto one platform. Importantly, with an increasing number of clients being averse towards paying for time spent on legal research, SideKick integrates the five steps of traditional research methods into one simple click.
Further, locating the relevant subsidiary legislation section and cross-referencing material with traditional research tools can prove to be impractical. As way of example, section 9 of the Securities and Futures Act (“SFA”) references three sub-sections of two separate subsidiary legislations, and was mentioned in eleven Monetary Authority of Singapore (“MAS”) documents. Using traditional tools, lawyers would have to open the subsidiary legislation in separate browser tabs and scroll to the relevant sub-sections; the quickest way to access the MAS material would be to search for documents containing “section 9” on the MAS website, but that produces over 220 results!
Therefore with SideKick, lawyers are shown related content that they might have otherwise not have considered, and potentially save up to 90% of time spent unnecessarily on searching for information.
3. How do I use SideKick?
INTELLLEX’s product design principles are heavily anchored on the accessibility and reliability of our tools. We strive to provide our users with easy to use tools that fit in well with their workflow. And SideKick is no exception to these principles.
SideKick beta is now free to download here today. It functions as a sidebar on the SSO and can be hidden away when you don’t need it.
The content surfaced on SideKick are extracted live, directly from official sources, so you can be ensured that the information is both reliable and accurate.
We are extremely excited and encouraged by the response we have received on SideKick thus far. If you’ve enjoyed using SideKick, give us a shout out!
We hope to add new features and bring SideKick to our international users ASAP. Your comments / thoughts / feedback would be invaluable for us in making SideKick better and more accessible to more lawyers.
Contact@intelllex.com
Special thanks to our intern, Augustine Chen, for his editorial work on this article.
