"Don't Fear AI, Use It Every Day"... Legal Community's "AI Evangelist" Kang Minkoo [Choi Seokjin's Law & Biz]

Legal Professionals Skilled in AI Will Replace Those Who Are Not
Recent Months of AI Progress Represent “Cosmic Upheaval,” Compressing Years of Advancement
Strengthen Your Thinking Muscle Through Analog Foundations Like Writing and Meditation

In March 2016, when Lee Sedol, 9-dan professional Go player, was defeated by AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence (AI), the shockwaves in the world of Go were tremendous. As AI triumphed in Go—long believed to be the final bastion of human intellect—many professional players lamented, “Now Go is over.” Yet ten years later, the world’s strongest player has emerged as Shin Jinseo, 9-dan, who has deeply understood AI and used it extensively in training more than anyone else.

AI is already radically reshaping paradigms across every sector of society. The legal profession—historically a world of voluminous books and towering stacks of paperwork—is no exception. Now, the divide between legal professionals who know how to harness AI and those who do not goes far beyond efficiency; it has become a matter of survival. Kang Minkoo, representative attorney at Dawool Law Firm (formerly presiding judge at Seoul High Court), who has taken on the role of “AI evangelist” in the legal field after 36 years on the bench, spoke with us about approaches to generative AI in law and key judicial and legislative issues.

Mingu Kang, Managing Attorney at Law Firm Doul. (Former Presiding Judge at Seoul High Court)

The following is a Q&A with Attorney Kang.

-As a judge in the traditionally conservative courts, what sparked your interest in IT and AI?

▲In 1985, while serving as a faculty member at the Korea Military Academy, I was deeply shocked to see “dummy terminals” connected to medium and large-sized computers—so much so that I lost sleep over them. I taught myself computer languages like Pascal and Fortran, becoming convinced that these would be the most powerful tools for legal professionals in the future. After beginning work as a judge in 1988, I personally purchased an assembled XT computer—costing almost as much as a used car at the time—and used it directly to draft judgments and perform complex calculations for damage claims. The more conservative the organization, I believed, the more we needed to prove technology not as an end in itself, but as a means to improve accuracy, speed, and public convenience—demonstrated through concrete results.

-You are known to have played a major role in building the Supreme Court’s comprehensive legal information system.

▲From 1997 to 1998, I worked as a research judge at the Supreme Court and participated in developing “Comprehensive Legal Information 1.0,” launching the initial service on the court’s internal network in September 1998. The project involved integrating scattered case precedents, statutes, and legal literature into one searchable database. As a sitting judge, I closely verified the development together with the team. Ultimately, this innovation greatly reduced the time judicial researchers and judges spent paging through printed casebooks in the era before digital searches.

On June 23rd, at the Legal Newspaper Education Center in Seocho-gu, Seoul, Kang Minkoo, representative lawyer of Law Firm Doul, gave a lecture on AI to reporters covering the legal sector. Photo by Seokjin Choi, Law & Biz Specialist

-After leaving the bench, you have been giving lectures nationwide. What do you focus on in your talks?

▲Rather than delving into the technical complexity of AI, I focus on practical applications that can be immediately implemented in the workplace. I demonstrate the latest trends, meta-prompting, methods for merging outputs from multiple AIs after posing the same query, as well as practices for checking hallucinations and security, all with real-time screens. For business professionals, I emphasize rebuilding everything—market research, planning, reporting, and customer response—centered on AI. For legal professionals, I recommend going beyond simple summarization and drafting, to include issue extraction, searching for counterarguments, and developing litigation strategies; but I stress that ultimate decision-making and responsibility must always remain with humans.

-You recently compared the pace of AI innovation to “a cosmic upheaval.” Could you elaborate?

▲AI is no longer just a search engine. Human language is becoming the core element that drives computers, and AI is evolving to understand text, speech, images, and tables simultaneously—integrating everything from research to content creation and follow-up execution. Recent advances in long-context reasoning, inference, and agentic abilities in models like Gemini and Anthropic compress several years worth of progress into just a few months. This is not an exaggeration about a particular technology—it means that the cost, speed, and organizational structures of knowledge work are all being reshaped at once.

Kang Mingu, Representative Attorney at Law Firm Doul, utilizes the 'AI Six Generals' in his work.

-You mentioned investing about 1 million won per month to use your “AI Six Musketeers” in your work.

▲That is because each AI has unique specialized strengths. GPT is used for crafting meta-prompts and designing workflows; Gemini excels in analyzing vast datasets and deep research; Claude is great for logical analysis of lengthy records, initial drafting of legal documents, and editing writing style; Perplexity serves as an up-to-date web search assistant, while Grok is my go-to for real-time issues and fact-checking counterarguments. Additionally, I use Gemini Notebook for securely structuring case materials and preparing litigation documents. To overcome the blind spots of any single model, I input the same prompt in parallel across several models and then merge the results.

-What are the key know-hows and competencies for mastering AI?

▲AI is a “garbage-in, garbage-out; smart-in, smart-out” machine. You must clearly specify the facts, objectives, issues, prohibited elements, and desired format. The ability to ask good questions—what I call “thinking muscle”—comes from analog experience. It requires reading paper books, writing daily, meditating, conducting thought experiments, and conversing with experts. Upon this foundation, the fastest way is daily, hands-on application to actual work, persistently recording and revising even failed prompts through repetition.

-It’s said that the status of junior (associate) attorneys is shrinking.

▲It is true that many junior-level tasks, such as searching case law, summarizing records, and reviewing contracts, are being compressed; and this presents an issue, as apprenticeship-based training ladders may weaken. However, understanding the weight of facts and evidence, empathizing with clients’ suffering, persuading people in court, and taking ethical responsibility remain uniquely human tasks. AI will not replace attorneys. Rather, attorneys who skillfully use AI will replace those who do not.

Presentation materials of Kang Minkoo, Representative Lawyer of Lawfirm Doul, on AI given at Legal Times Education Center in Seocho-gu, Seoul on June 23. Seokjin Choi, Lo&Biz Specialist

-What countermeasures do you suggest for AI hallucinations and security risks?

▲Never trust an AI-generated case number or citation as it is. You need a system that fences off results so that only official, web-verified precedents are provided, and cross-compare every citation manually with original sources such as the Supreme Court’s comprehensive legal information. Secret materials that have not been properly anonymized should never be entered into external AI. Unified usage guidelines and secure, legal-industry-specific AI should be developed urgently by the courts and bar associations. Moreover, if an attorney submits a false citation due to gross negligence, correction orders, cost sanctions, and tiered disciplinary standards based on intent must also be established.

-Why have you continuously advocated for the full disclosure of court decisions?

▲Court decisions are public goods funded by taxpayers, and they are the starting point for judicial oversight. Only when decisions are public can the consistency and predictability of rulings be scrutinized, and the information gap between large law firms, solo attorneys, and the public can be reduced. If AI is the engine, court decisions are the premium fuel. Of course, sensitive personal information in family, sex crime, and juvenile cases must be strictly protected. But, in place of excessive anonymization, rational pseudonymization that reveals a party’s position in the case should be expanded.

-Is there a message you wish to convey to young legal professionals and legislative policymakers?

▲To younger colleagues, I urge: do not fear or worship AI—use it every day. To tame this “thousand-li horse” called AI, deep legal expertise and ethical awareness are essential. Don’t delay in using it; accumulate small experiences of success and develop your own standards for work. The government and National Assembly must also build on the recently enacted Basic Act on Artificial Intelligence, tying together deregulation, support for startups, public data openness, and the development of computing infrastructure as part of a national strategy. Additionally, nationwide AI literacy education—at both the central and local government levels—must be promoted to simultaneously achieve technological sovereignty and bridge the AI gap. In my recently published book “AI, Asking the Way,” I organized 40 interdisciplinary issues related to AI, and I am sharing short YouTube videos on each topic—about five minutes each—for everyone. I hope they are widely referenced.

"AI, Asking the Way," a new book by Kang Minku, Chief Attorney at Dawool Law Firm.

He is...

1981 Graduated from the College of Law, Seoul National University

1982 Passed the 24th National Judicial Exam

1983 Graduated from the Graduate School of Law, Seoul National University

1984 Completed the 14th Judicial Research and Training Institute

1985 Professor, Department of Law, Faculty of Academic Affairs, Korea Military Academy

1988 Judge, Uijeongbu Branch of Seoul District Court

1999 Completed the Court Informatization program at the National Center for State Courts, USA

2011 Co-President, Korea Information Law Association

2014 Chief Judge, Changwon District Court

2015 Chief Judge, Busan District Court

2017 Director of the Supreme Court Library and concurrently Chair of the Judicial Information Strategy Committee

2020 Presiding Judge, Seoul High Court

2024 Representative Lawyer, Dawool Law Firm

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