Law&Company, Upstage to set local precedent with AI legal assistant

The operator behind Korea's largest legal consulting app is teaming up with the local AI firm to develop a legal assistant tailored to the Korean legal sector.

Law&Company Vice Chairman Jung Jae-sung, left, and Upstage Vice President Kwon Soon-il pose for a photo after a signing ceremony at Law&Company's headquarters in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on Monday. [LAW&COMPANY]

Law&Company, the operator behind Korea’s largest legal consulting app, LawTalk, will collaborate with local generative AI startup Upstage to launch an AI-powered legal assistant for lawyers, the company said on Tuesday.

The two companies will co-develop a foundation model dubbed "Solar-Legal" tailored to Korean-language legal services, which will be utilized to operate Law&Company’s "Super Lawyer" AI legal assistant, according to the LawTalk operator on Tuesday.

Both the foundation model and AI service are scheduled to be released in June.

Solar-Legal is trained using 4.43 million pieces of precedent data as well as 160,000 legal data on legislation and authoritative interpretation.

Upstage comes into play by providing its homegrown foundation model, Solar, with a parameter scale of 10.7 billion. Solar topped the list of Hugging Face’s open LLM Leaderboard last December, beating well-known competitors such as OpenAI and Mistral AI.

Hugging Face acts as a hub for AI experts, and its LLM leaderboard is considered a barometer of open-source generative AI models.

Super Lawyer will be a subscription-based AI chatbot that assists attorneys with legal tasks, such as document review and contracts as well as text summarization, translation and research, similar to the functions offered by California-based legal AI company Casetext’s legal service, CoCounsel.

Super Lawyer will be available both in the cloud and on-location.

"The domestic legal tech industry is feeling growing concern as global AI giants eye the Korean market," said Law&Company CEO Kim Bon-hwan in a statement. "With determination to safeguard the technological sovereignty of the Korean legal AI market, we will enhance our industrial competitiveness through our partnership with Upstage and introduce innovative services that will change the landscape of the domestic and global legal tech market."

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]