More Lawyers Now Creating Their Own Coding AI Tools

Codex AI Usage in Legal Field Up 108-Fold in Just Four Months

The use of 'coding artificial intelligence (AI),' once considered the exclusive domain of developers, is growing among lawyers, law firm practitioners, and law school students, who are now increasingly utilizing it in their work. They are building work environments, human resources systems, and even case law search programs directly with AI. This change is driven by the proliferation of coding AI tools that can generate programs simply by describing desired features in natural language.

According to corporate user data released by OpenAI on August 12, weekly active users of Codex (a software engineering AI agent) in legal professions increased 108-fold between February and June 2026. During the same period, active user numbers in sales and recruitment rose by 41 times each, marketing by 26 times, and engineering by 5 times. For legal professionals, coding accounted for the largest share of Codex uses at 32.9%.

The Law Times

Lawyers in Korea are also creating work tools themselves using coding AI. At Changcheon Law Firm, attorneys implement functions needed for their work and apply them in case handling, using tools such as Claude Code, ChatGPT, and Grok.

Whereas reviewing materials for an opinion used to take up to three days and drafting litigation documents sometimes as long as a week, it can now take just a single day to prepare a draft for most cases. Changcheon attorney Jung Younghoon (Judicial Research and Training Institute, Class 41) said, "It is almost meaningless to calculate just how much work productivity has improved thanks to coding AI."

Coding AI is also used for internal law firm tasks and legal information searches. At a boutique law firm in Seocho-dong, Seoul, an internal system was developed using AI to manage attendance, leave, sick days, and personnel records. The 'Case Note Searcher' Chrome extension for Google browser was created by a Hanyang Law School student, assisted by generative AI.

The increasing use of coding AI in legal fields is closely related to the nature of the work itself. According to the summer 2026 issue of "Employment Issue" by the Korea Employment Information Service, an analysis of AI exposure for 415 occupations ranked lawyers, legal clerks, and patent attorneys among the professions with the highest exposure. The research team noted, "Text interpretation and quantitative data analysis are core tasks for legal professionals."

Attorney Jung Younghoon remarked, "Legal questions do not always have one answer like a math problem, but the range of possible answers is nonetheless somewhat defined." He added, "AI excels at processing data and deriving possible solutions." He described the remaining roles for lawyers—those beyond the reach of AI—as ▲ speaking directly with clients, ▲ understanding the background and context of cases, and ▲ reviewing the results produced by AI.

Hanju Cho, The Law Times Journalist

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

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