State Counsel
also State (of the Art) Counsel
Sze Yao is a Government lawyer in Singapore, and is passionate about bridging the gap in AI takeup between the private and public sectors. A millennial born during a slower age in 1982, he has found it a change of pace to keep up with the pace of change in legal tech. The journey has been equal parts disquiet, exhilaration and optimism. Sze Yao read law at and graduated from the University of Cambridge with Double First Class Honours (2003, 2004) under a Singapore Public Service Commission scholarship. He was further sponsored to read for an LLM at Columbia University, where he graduated as Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar in 2005. In 2012, Sze Yao was jointly funded for his second LLM at Kyushu University by the Japanese and Singaporean governments, where he graduated top of his class. Sze Yao is now interested in a different type of LLM.
A Word-integrated desktop tool that allows users to manage, cite and export exhibits with minimal fuss. Inserted citations can be refreshed with one click even after amendments have been made (e.g. re-ordering of exhibit numbers, re-naming of existing exhibits etc). ExhiBytes also allows users to preview exhibits without opening, annotate exhibits with internal notes, and export bundles based on selected (or all) exhibits. File formats supported are generous: PDF, DOCX, DOC, XLSX, XLS, PPTX, PPT, ODT, ODS, ODP, RTF, TXT, PNG, JPG, JPEG, and EML. ExhiBytes runs locally on the user's desktop and does not require any API key calls.
AI-powered document redaction that runs entirely on your machine. Drag-and-drop a contract, review what gets redacted, then export and download the clean file — the document never leaves your device. The redacted document can then be safely uploaded to other AI contract analysis tools for substantive review. Built on Microsoft Presidio and spaCy en_core_web_lg for reliable, production-quality entity detection. Users can optionally layer on BERT-based NER (dslim/bert-base-NER) as a toggle for deeper coverage of unusual names and organisations.
Detects the active window every 60 seconds — documents, emails, research, calls — and logs automatically. Step away and forget to manually pause? No problem. If there's no keyboard or mouse input for 2+ minutes, Ghost Logger automatically flags the entry as (Idle) — so idle time never sneaks into billable hours. All data saved locally. No cloud, no subscription. User can open the CSV log in Excel anytime for billing or review.
A nifty web-based tool that allows for the calculation of court deadlines (for filings etc) based on various trigger events set out in the Singapore Rules of Court 2021. Results display with a calendar view, allowing the user to re-confirm the number of days counted and the actual deadline day.
Any other reason is just vanity.
Think about how you can contribute to the world instead.