[Invest&Law] Legal Tech Renaissance

Talent from Corporate Legal Teams and Major Law Firms
Boom in Job Moves to Legal Tech Startups
Attention on Potential with the Emergence of Generative AI

More lawyers are leaving stable jobs in large corporate legal teams and major law firms to join legal tech startups.

With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and growing attention to the potential of legal tech, legal professionals are expanding their roles beyond traditional legal work to the forefront of product development, including AI training and project management. As various legal information services become essential tools for improving legal work efficiency, legal tech is entering a full-fledged growth phase beyond its initial blossoming period.

According to the legal community, AI legal solution company BHSN (CEO Lim Jeong-geun) recruited two lawyers from Samsung’s legal team in January this year. They are Lawyer Kim Hyun-geun (47, Judicial Research and Training Institute class 40), who worked in Samsung Heavy Industries’ legal team and compliance management office, and Lawyer Park Seon-dong (47, class 38), who previously worked at law firm Yulchon and Samsung Electronics’ compliance team.

They directly participate in the development and planning of legal tech services. Lawyer Park is responsible for data labeling and feedback tasks during the AI’s legal data training process. Along with Lawyer Kim, he is also involved in planning AI solutions, accelerating the development of new solutions in areas such as compliance and taxation.

At Ro&Good (CEO Lawyer Min Myeong-gi), which provides legal AI chatbot services, Lawyer Park Su-jin (34, Bar Exam 7th) joined in December last year. Majoring in mathematics, she worked at law firms LKB & Partners and Sejong, and now oversees litigation finance at Ro&Good, processing AI training data to enhance the legal AI chatbot.

◆ "Essential for legal work"... The establishment of first-generation legal tech also stimulates the trend = The main reason for the ongoing wave of lawyers moving to the legal tech industry is that they experience firsthand the advancement of related technologies such as precedent search and legal document drafting. Most corporate legal teams and law firms utilize legal tech for gathering legal professional information, precedent searches, and managing legal documents.

Successful cases of first-generation legal tech pioneers, who have recently stood out, are also encouraging lawyers in their 30s and 40s to switch careers. Lee Jin (42, class 38), a former lawyer at Kim & Chang law firm who founded the precedent search service company ‘Elbox’ in 2019, recently launched ‘Elfind,’ a service that searches lawyers based on court rulings. They are developing a legal AI service ‘ElboxAI’ aiming for release next month.

Lim Young-ik (54, class 41), a former researcher at Purdue University in the U.S., founded Intellicon in 2009 and introduced AI document search and analysis solutions such as ‘Docubrain.’ Last month, they succeeded in developing ‘Koala,’ a language model specialized for Korean law. Lawyer Min Myeong-gi (37, class 45), who worked at law firm Sejong and founded Ro&Good in 2020, launched Korea’s first litigation finance service in March last year and has executed over 30 cases with notable results.

Other leaders driving the revival of Korean legal tech include Lawyer Kim Min-gyun (44, 1st bar exam), who created the precedent search site ‘CaseNote,’ and Lee Sang-hoo (37, 2nd bar exam), head of AI at Ro&Company, who led the development of the legal platform ‘Lotoc’ and the code and precedent site ‘BigCase.’ Both are KAIST alumni.

◆ U.S. No.1 company enters Korea... Legal tech competition accelerates = Competition among domestic and international companies for leadership in the legal tech market is intensifying. On the 19th, LexisNexis, the No.1 legal tech company in the U.S., officially launched its legal professional AI solution ‘Lexis+ AI’ in Korea. It provides answers to user questions in a conversational manner and can summarize documents and draft initial versions. Thanks to training on vast legal data including mostly publicly available U.S. precedents, it is evaluated as having higher answer completeness and fewer hallucination symptoms compared to Korean legal tech.

According to global market research firm Traxcn, as of February this year, there are 8,228 legal tech companies worldwide. The U.S. alone has 3,215 legal tech companies including DocuSign and FiscalNote.

Korea has about 40 legal tech companies, making it smaller in scale. However, it is preparing for full-scale legal tech market opening by releasing numerous generative AI-related services recently. Intellicon launched the AI consultation solution ‘Law GPT’ in May last year.

Ro&Good also unveiled the AI legal consultation service ‘Ro&Bot’ using ChatGPT in the same month. Alliances and mergers among companies are continuing. Ro&Company has agreed to jointly develop ‘Solar Legal,’ a large language model (LLM) specialized in law, with domestic AI specialist Upstage.

Hong Su-jeong, Legal Times Reporter

※This article is based on content supplied by Law Times.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.