'SuperLawyer' AI offers legal assistance to law firms

Tech

Published: 09 Jul. 2024, 18:57

'SuperLawyer' AI offers legal assistance to law firms

SuperLawyer's AI Team Lead Lee Sang-hoo speaks during a press conference for its legal AI assistant service held on Tuesday. [LAW&COMPANY]

It has long been anticipated that some of the tasks carried out by paralegals could be readily replaced with advanced generative AI. Law&Company, the operator of Korea's top legal consulting app, hopes to make that idea a reality with the new web-based service called SuperLawyer.

SuperLawyer, launched on July 1, is an AI legal assistant tailored to lawyers, law firms and private legal departments. It aims to help them with tasks including summarizing legal documents, writing first drafts and researching cases.

While lawyers have had services like ChatGPT at their disposal for some time, SuperLawyer is the first AI legal assistant specialized in Korea's legal system and laws. The service utilizes its 4.5 million pieces of precedent data such as legislation, administrative rule and authoritative interpretation in its legal database alongside the help of 1,300-plus law-related books from legal publisher Parkyoungsa.

The model, when it receives a query, first searches its database for related cases and includes relevant legal precedents when returning its answer.

Another big hiccup commonly associated with popular generative models like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini is their tendency to hallucinate, or generate false or misleading answers. Law&Company also insists that this won't be a problem with their model; the company has vowed to make its product “hallucination-free” by the first half of 2025.

The company declined to share statistics related to the service’s rate of hallucination, citing “difficulties in numerically measuring” the phenomenon, but did emphasize that its “Fact-Checker” procedure will “cross-reference each answer before sending it to the end user.”

The AI assistant will also link to any precedent and legislation referenced in its answers so the end user can double-check the result.

SuperLawyer, Law&Company's legal AI assistant, launched on July 1 [LAW&COMPANY]

The example shown at the press event on Tuesday in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, saw SuperLawyer making up a story when prompted to draft a complaint for judges "showing the emotional pain the client has suffered" without providing additional information about the real client.

Law&Company also made clear that end users should check the LLM's work.

“We are providing the service to the lawyers, and they can make the [final] judgment themselves,” said Ahn Ki-soon, a lawyer and Law&Company’s director of Legal AI Lab. The company added that it had no plans to release SuperLawyer to the general public, who might be more susceptible to inaccurate answers.

“A lawyer can and should rewrite the text based on their client,” Ahn said, adding that lawyers can also provide the service extra information for a more accurate answer.

SuperLawyer can answer queries at two different speeds: An “accurate” model uses multiple large language model (LLM) outputs to increase precision, outputting an answer in around 1 minute and 30 seconds while a “faster” model can output a — perhaps messier — answer in 25 seconds.

A 20-minute hands-on session that reporters were given during SuperLawyer's press event proved the pros and cons of each option. The faster model struggled to find specific cases as requested; the slower model was more accurate, but 1 minute and 30 seconds was quite a while to wait.

User-uploaded content will not be used to train SuperLawyer, but “pieces of extracts” from the uploaded document will be sent to the LLM for added security, according to the company.

The legal assistant can also read and interpret uploaded Microsoft Word documents, PDFs and works in Hancom’s HWP format, widely used by government institutions.

The company is also preparing SuperLawyer Enterprise, a product custom-built for medium to large-sized law firms, governmental agencies and private companies. The LLM will operate within customer companies “to reduce security risks,” and firms will be able to train it on their internal documents.

SuperLawyer is free for attorneys to use during its first month of launch. The “standard model” eventually set to be priced at 99,000 won ($71) per month and the “professional model” at 154,000 won; Law&Company did not detail the difference between the options but said they are related to “usage.”

The company hopes to release SuperLawyer in Japan and other Asian countries in the future but refrained from specifying a release date as the rollouts will require construction and training using the legal data of each country.

BY CHO YONG-JUN [cho.yongjun1@joongang.co.kr]