South Korean law firm Barun completes first cohort of 'Corporate Legal Expert Course', training in-house lawyers to direct AI tools rather than compete with them
Law firm Barun, one of South Korea's leading commercial practices (led by co-CEOs Lee Dong-hoon, Lee Young-hee, and Kim Do-hyung), has completed the first cohort of its nine-week 'Corporate Legal Expert Course' — a structured curriculum designed to develop the skills of in-house lawyers with one to five years' experience. Thirty in-house lawyers from major South Korean corporates — including AmorePacific, NHN, Nongshim, Shinyoung Securities, and Hyundai Engineering — completed the programme, which covered 18 practical topics including shareholders' meetings, investigation response, personal data protection, trade secrets, international legal strategy, labour issues, and mergers and acquisitions. The course included a dedicated lecture on AI literacy for corporate legal professionals, in which partner Lee Eui-kyu argued that in-house lawyers should 'direct AI, not compete with AI' — positioning the legal officer as the strategic head of AI-assisted decision-making rather than a practitioner displaced by it. A separate session addressed international legal strategy using AI, taught by partner Kang Bo-ram. The Korean Bar Association has been applied to for recognition of the course as qualifying mandatory continuing training for lawyers. The programme reflects a growing recognition among leading commercial firms — on both sides of the Atlantic — that the in-house legal function is evolving from contract review to strategic risk management, and that AI literacy is now a core professional competency rather than an optional specialism.
Why this matters
Law firm Barun's structured AI literacy curriculum for in-house lawyers is significant because it institutionalises the argument — increasingly heard at City firms and in the SRA's regulatory guidance — that lawyers must understand AI tools well enough to supervise and direct their outputs, not merely use them. The 'direct AI, not compete with AI' framing is a direct response to anxiety in the legal profession about automation; by making it a training deliverable, Barun is positioning itself as a strategic partner to the in-house community rather than a transactional service provider. For UK law students, the takeaway is that AI governance, AI literacy, and the professional conduct implications of AI-assisted legal work are becoming assessment criteria in law firm interviews, not just conversation topics.
On the Ground
A trainee asked to prepare for an AI governance-related matter would be reviewing a vendor due diligence questionnaire for an AI legal research tool, marking up a data processing agreement to flag obligations under the UK GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the proposed EU AI Act, and drafting a regulatory impact assessment memo comparing the tool's outputs against the firm's professional conduct obligations under the SRA Code of Conduct.
Interview prep
Soundbite
Firms training in-house lawyers to direct AI are building the client relationships that will survive automation of routine legal work.
Question you might get
“If you were advising a FTSE 100 general counsel on implementing an AI legal research tool across the in-house team, what governance framework and professional conduct considerations would you prioritise?”
Full answer
Law firm Barun has completed a nine-week AI and corporate law training programme for thirty in-house lawyers, with a core pedagogical message that legal officers should direct AI tools strategically rather than treat them as competitors. This matters because it reflects a global shift in how commercial law firms position themselves relative to in-house teams: the value proposition is no longer volume legal work but strategic advice, with AI handling the routine and lawyers providing judgment. The broader trend is one of law firms investing in in-house lawyer development as a business development tool — strengthening the firm-client relationship while also ensuring that client-side lawyers are sophisticated enough to deploy AI responsibly. For City firms, this raises the question of whether formal AI governance training will become a standard feature of client service programmes alongside legal updates and sector seminars.
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