ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Legal technology (legal tech) is an innovative field that aims to increase the efficiency of legal work through the integration of legal services and technology. Key technologies in legal tech include AI, automation tools, and big data. These technologies are applied to a variety of legal tasks, including the analysis of legal documents, contract review, legal research automation, contract management, electronic discovery, smart contracts, and case law analysis. The adoption of legal tech is expected to enhance the efficiency of legal services and improve consumer choice and access to legal services. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks for legal professionals, legal tech is anticipated to significantly reduce the time required to provide legal services and lower personnel costs, thus enhancing work efficiency. Despite the high utility of legal tech, there are challenges faced in the traditionally conservative legal market. These include legal regulations on the use of technology, maintaining the confidentiality and security of legal data, resistance to the adoption of technology in traditional legal fields, and initial implementation costs. To overcome these challenges, collaboration between legal and technology experts is essential, along with efforts to strengthen the competency in utilizing legal tech from the stage of training legal professionals and ensuring the reliability of technology. Law schools and universities should develop and operate digital competency enhancement programs, which include ‘prompt engineering’ and ‘digital leadership’—key technologies for improving AI's natural language processing capabilities and essential for AI models to understand user intentions and generate appropriate responses. Digital competency involves the ability to collect and utilize information using media and tools, extending beyond the mere use of digital devices to include critical thinking skills for understanding and evaluating diverse information and the ability to use information purposefully. Enhancing digital competency, that is, developing the ability to utilize legal tech, requires the establishment of an infrastructure that fosters a socio-normative environment conducive to the use of legal tech. Referring to Germany's ‘Legal Services Act,’ it is necessary to delineate the scope of work between legal practitioners and legal tech and ensure the safety of the legal market. Additionally, foundational work to ensure the reliability of legal tech includes establishing legal tech centers at universities and offering comparative law courses at a Tech-law level to establish digital norms in an increasingly borderless digital environment, thereby promoting the safe and normative establishment of legal tech. The future prospects for legal tech are bright, with the potential to become the standard for legal services as it continues to develop. Hence, there must be ongoing social discussions on the development and operation of programs aimed at enhancing legal practitioners' competencies in a digital society and improving digital adaptability.

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