Legal professions top South Korea's AI exposure rankings
Lawyers face the highest exposure to artificial intelligence among all workers in South Korea, according to a new study from the Korea Employment Information Service, a government labor research institute. The findings reflect AI's reach into text-heavy and analytical professions, with legal assistants and patent attorneys also ranking among the top five most-exposed occupations.
The study found that 2.92 million workers covered by the country's employment insurance system - 19.1 percent of those analyzed - held jobs classified as having high AI exposure. Researchers based the rankings on an analysis of abilities required in 415 occupations, drawing on a 2025 survey of incumbent workers and employment-related administrative data.
Who ranks where
Legal assistants, patent attorneys, biological science technicians, and accountants followed lawyers in the rankings. Journalists and other media professionals ranked 12th. The institute said occupations centered on text interpretation and quantitative data analysis tended to cluster near the top.
A high exposure score does not mean a job is more likely to disappear. It indicates how closely the skills required for an occupation align with capabilities that can be performed or supported by AI. For AI for Legal professionals, this distinction matters: exposure measures overlap, not replacement.
Occupations with the lowest exposure included metal-coating and spraying machine operators, plasterers, rice cake makers, and meat-processing and slaughterhouse workers. These jobs typically require physical work in production, construction, or other on-site settings.
Generational divide in exposure
Workers in their 30s were particularly concentrated in AI-exposed occupations, with 53.1 percent employed in jobs classified as having medium or high exposure. Among workers under 30, employment declined more sharply in highly exposed occupations. With 2022 employment set at 100, the index fell to 86.6 for highly exposed occupations in 2025, compared with 92.5 for low-exposure occupations.
The institute cautioned against attributing the difference solely to generative AI. Employment in highly exposed occupations had already been declining before ChatGPT was released in late 2022. Economic and demographic factors, including a shrinking youth population and declining labor force participation, may also have contributed.
The entry-level squeeze
Legal assistants and paralegals should pay attention to the report's warning about early-career workers. "Young people entering the labor market may be more sensitive to the spread of generative AI, and a continued decline in entry-level jobs could adversely affect their ability to gain experience and build skills over the medium to long term," the report said. An AI Learning Path for Paralegals can help early-career legal staff build the skills that align with evolving job requirements.
The report called for occupation-specific AI competency indicators that would allow job seekers to assess their AI skills and be matched with jobs suited to those skills.
Why this matters for legal professionals
Lawyers and legal support staff sit at the top of South Korea's AI exposure index, but exposure does not equal elimination. The skills most aligned with AI - text interpretation, document analysis, quantitative reasoning - are also the skills that can be augmented by it. Legal professionals who understand how AI handles these tasks will be positioned to supervise, review, and improve that work rather than compete against it.
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