Lawyers, counselors grapple with what AI can and cannot replace

A Seoul-based lawyer surnamed Ha spends about 600,000 won ($410) a month on artificial intelligence (AI) subscriptions such as Claude and Korean legal platforms such as SuperLawyer and LBOX. Hiring a junior lawyer would cost him close to 100 million won a year, roughly 14 times as much. The math, he says, is no longer close. “Without AI, I’d probably have one more person in the office by now,” Ha told The Korea Times, adding that over the past two years, he has used large language models intensively for work. “I still need to review the quality of final drafts, but the need to hire new lawyers has definitely gone down.” Only a few years ago, Korean law firms routinely hired swarms of new law school graduates to plow through ruling precedents, check statutes and draft the first versions of briefs. Now, more managing partners reach for a subscription instead of a job posting, and the same calculation is playing out across other white-collar professions, from legal offices to counseling rooms, as AI forces a reckoning over what kind of work still requires a human. “I don’t re

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