Facts
On 29 September 2021 a lawyer at a law firm asked the Seoul Bar Association for permission to take up a second post as an employee of Lawform, a legal tech company. Since 2019 its online platform had automatically produced documents such as demand letters, payment-order applications, contracts and criminal complaints: the user chose a document type, and prepared sentence modules slotted the user's answers into the blanks of a standard template. The platform also offered review of documents by partner lawyers for KRW 250,000 or 320,000. On 8 November 2021 the Bar refused, stating that an algorithm completed the document after the user entered information and that the company was not a law firm.
Question
The question was whether an automated service that slots a user's answers, unreviewed and unedited, into a standard template amounts to 'preparing legal documents or otherwise handling legal affairs' in a matter, which Article 109(1) of the Korean Attorney-at-Law Act forbids non-lawyers to do. The refusal also cited Article 34 of the Act. In the proceedings the Bar argued in addition that the company used the automated service to broker paid lawyer review, which raised the question whether this new ground could be added after the fact to defend the refusal.
Decision
On 18 February 2025 the Seoul Administrative Court's 8th Division quashed the refusal. The prohibition requires work on a concrete, individual matter, with fact-finding, rule review and legal assessment. Here the user's input went into the template unchanged, much like filling in a form from a book of precedents. The key test is whether the system reviews and corrects the input; if AI checks suitability and recommends changes, the answer differs. In a remark not needed for the outcome, the court added that generative AI drafting documents from a user's account of their situation would fall within the ban. Paid lawyer review was legal practice and brokering plausible, but that ground was not in the refusal and could not be added.
Why it matters
Press reports described it as the first ruling on the automation of legal documents and the lawyers' monopoly to be confirmed at Supreme Court level. The court drew the line by asking whether the system reviews and alters what the user enters, a test that separates rule-based template services from generative AI tools that produce documents from a user's account of the facts. The Seoul High Court dismissed the Bar's appeal, and on 12 February 2026 the Supreme Court's Third Division dismissed the further appeal without a hearing on the merits (2025두35483), making the judgment final.
Related stages
Because the court found that the paid lawyer review was legal practice and that brokering it through the automated service was plausible, those questions may arise in separate proceedings. As the Supreme Court gave no reasons, the generative AI remark is the Seoul Administrative Court's, although some press reports attribute it to the Supreme Court. The date and docket number of the Seoul High Court judgment could not be verified for this entry.