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A view of the Ministry of the Interior and Safety building. / Photo by Reporter Park Sung-il

Cutting time to find statutes: Government officials develop their own 'AI Legal Secretary'

Public officials will now be able to verify necessary legal grounds by asking artificial intelligence (AI), eliminating the need to manually search through statutes and judicial precedents one by one.

The Ministry of Government Legislation, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, and the Ministry of Science and ICT announced on July 13 that they will launch a pilot service of the "AI Legal Secretary" for central and local government officials starting July 14.

The AI Legal Secretary is an administrative support service that answers legal questions arising during the planning, drafting, and execution of public policies. It searches through statutes, administrative rules, municipal ordinances, and judicial precedents to present relevant grounds and content required for legal review.

The service is loaded with 60,000 Supreme Court precedents and 240,000 statutes and administrative rules. Approximately 50,000 municipal ordinances from five regional governments—Seoul, Incheon, Daejeon, Sejong, and Gyeonggi—have also been added. While the database for municipal ordinances was initially scheduled to be built in the second half of this year, data from certain regions was integrated ahead of schedule to expedite the introduction of the pilot service.

Public servants can access the AI Legal Secretary through "On-AI Lab," an AI conversation service available on the internal government network. When a user enters a question, the system utilizes Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to search for relevant laws and precedents, generating an answer based on those findings. RAG is a technology that prompts the AI to base its responses on internal data, thereby reducing the so-called "hallucination" phenomenon where the system fabricates inaccurate information.

However, the answers provided by the AI cannot be used as a final legal interpretation or judgment. The government plans to ensure that officials utilize the system strictly as reference material during their legal review process.

The AI Legal Secretary was developed directly by government officials leveraging the pan-government AI common infrastructure and a proprietary AI foundation model. By integrating the Ministry of Government Legislation's legislative drafting and interpretation workflow with the existing statutory information database, the service was built in just one month without hiring separate professional developers.

Starting with this service, the government plans to expand the approach of having public officials directly develop the AI tools necessary for their respective duties across all ministries. It also intends to expand the volume of AI knowledge data available for administrative work and strengthen development support systems.

"The interpretation and enforcement of laws is a demanding task that requires a high level of expertise," said Cho Won-chul, Minister of Government Legislation. "Through the AI Legal Secretary, we will enhance the work efficiency of public servants and utilize the time saved to improve administrative services for the public."

Yoon Ho-jung, Minister of the Interior and Safety, noted, "This is the first case demonstrating the potential of AI transformation in the public sector. We will expand a work culture across the entire government where all public servants can directly develop and utilize the AI services necessary for their own duties."

                                                                                                          Kim Nam-hyung