Will the Ministry of Justice's 'LegalTech Guidelines' Hamper Domestic Companies?

Regulations Absent for Foreign AIs like ChatGPT
Japan Reconsiders Regulatory Burdens on Domestic Firms

The Ministry of Justice's AI LegalTech Special Subcommittee (Chairman Hong Daesik, Professor at Sogang University Law School) is pushing forward the "AI LegalTech Guidelines," which are intended to restrict paid domestic legal professional AI services for general consumers. According to these guidelines, while it would be possible to ask legal questions to general-purpose foreign AIs such as ChatGPT and Claude, some services provided by domestic LegalTech companies like LBox and SuperLawyer could be restricted, sparking controversy.

According to a draft of the guidelines obtained by The Law Times, a service is defined as a "judgment-type AI LegalTech service" if the AI provides a legal assessment by applying relevant laws after the user enters specific factual circumstances. Article 2 of the guidelines states, "Attorneys may not provide this service for a fee to general consumers."

On the other hand, services that do not provide legal assessments for specific cases may be offered as paid services (Article 3). This refers to services that draft documents or search and provide relevant laws and precedents without making a legal judgment on the information entered by the user. In short, the guidelines permit the provision of legal information to general consumers, but restrict the provision of specific legal judgments on individual cases.

AI is now widely utilized in matters related to law. Not only laypersons but also attorneys request draft responses from ChatGPT, and when leasing disputes arise, they often enter contract details into Claude to inquire about response strategies.

However, because of "hallucination" phenomena—where AI may cite non-existent precedents or convincingly provide inaccurate legal information—it is necessary to independently verify whether AI-cited precedents and referenced legal principles are accurate and actually exist.

To address such limitations, domestic LegalTech companies have worked to connect their legal AIs to databases of statutes and public precedents, enabling users to check the sources and grounds of AI-generated answers. However, under the proposed guidelines, general consumers would be restricted from receiving case-specific legal judgments (paid) from AI provided by domestic LegalTech firms specializing in law, while there would be few constraints on obtaining answers to the same questions from general-purpose AIs offered by overseas Big Tech companies.

The guidelines would also restrict eligibility for expert services, allowing corporate users access only under the supervision or management of in-house counsel. As a result, staff in legal departments without in-house counsel, as well as judicial scriveners, labor attorneys, and administrative scriveners, may face restrictions using judgment-type AIs. The same could affect startups and public institutions that find it difficult to retain in-house counsel but wish to utilize legal AI in their operations.

One of the models the Ministry of Justice's Special Subcommittee referenced in drafting the guidelines is Japan's Ministry of Justice's 2023 "AI LegalTech Guidelines."

Japan's Ministry of Justice set out criteria to determine whether contract drafting and review support services using AI constitute acts prohibited by the Attorney Act. However, it is now reportedly reconsidering the direction of its regulations. Through its regulatory reform implementation plan for July 2026, the Japanese government has prioritized "clarifying the rules for the use of AI LegalTech." Ensuring that domestic companies do not suffer disadvantages or lose international competitiveness in competition with overseas AI LegalTech is one of the review criteria.

Reported by Ubinn, The Law Times

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

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