AI Changing the Legal Industry
UK Luminance introduces AI dedicated to contracts
Attention to domestic ventures such as Elbox and Law&Good
Courts and police are also considering introducing AI in their work
KISDI “Legal Tech will grow the market”
Industry: “Technology can only advance if the judgment is made public”
There is opposition from the legal profession to the expansion of the role of AI.
“I am a victim of school violence. My friend hits me every day for no reason. I want to sue, but my mom doesn't have the money. “Would you please make a sample complaint for me?”
Kang Min-gu, Chief Judge of the Seoul High Court, asked a question by voice to Open AI’s Chat GPT. This is from a lecture for public officials held in Sejong City recently ahead of his retirement. GPT-4-based ChatGPT has released a series of school violence complaint forms. The influence of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing in the once conservative legal field. There is speculation in the legal world that AI will replace a significant portion of the work performed by lawyers at existing law firms.
○AI technology to help lawyers
According to the legal tech industry on the 31st, British company Luminance recently launched an AI program that completes everything from contract review to negotiation in one go without any human intervention. An AI specializing in negotiation reviews the contents of the contract and then exchanges the contract with the other AI. If there is a problem clause, mark it in red and replace it with a more appropriate one. Human lawyers participate in the final signing step.
This is an example of legal AI dramatically improving the work efficiency of lawyers. An American law firm reduced attorney workload by an average of 48% after introducing services from legal tech company Kira Systems. The effect was that AI analyzed unfair clauses in contracts that lawyers had to review and was provided with visualized data.
Korean law firms are also entrusting simple tasks such as document classification and foreign language translation to AI. Sejong Law Firm uses AI to share legal documents such as opinions and complaints. Yulchon introduced an AI system that automatically extracts text from videos. There are many domestic startup services targeting the lawyer market. Elbox, which operates an AI judgment search service, is used by half of domestic lawyers. Docubrain, Intellicon Lab’s document analysis solution, is also a service used by many law firms.
Controversy over ‘AI lawyer’ also intensifies
The reason why AI is so hot in the legal field is because of the nature of work that involves a lot of document work. The industry predicts that the legal industry will become a test bed for AI technology. The expected size of the legal AI market in 2027 is $46.5 billion (approximately 62 trillion won). Goldman Sachs also analyzed in a recent report that 44% of all work in the legal industry will be automated.
There are also high expectations that AI development will revolutionize the legal industry. “It will increase access to litigation for poor people, revolutionize legal research, and help resolve lawsuits quickly and inexpensively,” said U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. The Korea Information and Communication Policy Institute (KISDI) recently published a study showing that the entire legal market expanded by 27% just with the presence of Legal Tech. The analysis also added that “the expansion effect is concentrated on vulnerable groups.”
However, controversy over AI lawyers always follows. Recently, an app called Iavoca developed by an entrepreneur from Lyon, France, became an issue. The promotional slogan that said, ‘What would take a lawyer a year to solve in just one minute’ was problematic. The French legal profession was turned upside down by the emergence of an AI lawyer who provides legal advice for 69 euros per year. The developer decided to change the name of the app to ‘Intelligence Legal’, excluding Avoca (lawyer). A similar thing already happened in Korea about two years ago. Rotalk launched an AI sentence prediction service in 2021 but had to give up the service due to opposition from lawyer groups.
Legal AI services become more diverse
There is no disagreement in the legal community that AI will reduce the time required to summarize and organize legal documents. ChatGPT and Google Bard can draft a complaint according to the entered instructions without separately learning Korean legal data.
Even conservative courts and police are becoming proactive in using AI. The National Court Administration is preparing to introduce ‘Trial Support Assistant AI’ (tentative name) as a way to solve the problem of trial delays. Chief Judge Kang, known as the ‘AI evangelist’ within the court, recently emphasized at a banquet for retired judges, “Using AI has the effect of attaching three or more researchers to every judge.” The National Police Agency is also considering introducing an AI system so that citizens can easily write complaints using AI.
Legal tech services using AI are becoming more diverse. BHSN launched AI legal solution Allibi on this day. We provide an all-in-one legal service that can resolve contracts and consultations in all departments within the company using AI. Law & Good operates Law & Good, a chatbot that specializes in divorce, traffic accidents, and sexual crimes. GenIP (patent application writing), Elbox (judgment search), and Bering Lab (legal AI translation) are also Korean legal tech startups that are attracting attention.
Startups’ AI technology is becoming more sophisticated. Lo&Company, the operator of LoTalk, announced that Big Case GPT, developed in-house using GTP-4, recorded a correct answer rate of 53.3% in multiple choice questions on the bar exam. It is much higher than the correct answer rate (34.0%) when GTP-4 is applied as is.
○“Judgment data must be disclosed”
AI’s ‘hallucination’ problem (hallucinations, plausible lies) is a task that legal tech companies must solve. The industry is demanding that Korean courts disclose decision data to resolve hallucination and advance technology. The enormous amount of rulings written based on laws, precedents, and papers is said to be a ‘treasure of AI learning.’ However, only a small portion of the rulings are made public in Korea. Because of the strict anonymization, it looks like ciphertext. Min Myeong-gi, CEO of Law & Good, said, “Except for a very small number of cases, we have to pay 1,000 won per ruling to purchase it,” and added, “Because it costs a lot to build a database, developing legal AI is not easy.”
There are also voices calling for a Legal Tech Promotion Act. Legal Tech's various services may violate the Attorney General's Law, so the more sophisticated the technology, the greater the legal dilemma. An industry official pointed out, “Legislative supplementation is urgently needed to enable AI technology to be utilized in various areas such as litigation review and legal consultation,” and added, “The longer the legislation is delayed, the more the global competitiveness of domestic legal tech will inevitably decline.”