Episode 72

"Ah, you've arrived."

Among the executives gathered in the conference room, a cheerful-looking man waved his hand at me.

Was it Jo Young-cheol? He was the one I had contacted beforehand, asking him to convene this executive meeting.

The other executives were glancing in my direction with expressions of doubt.

Since it was an IT startup, the average age was relatively young.

"That person is..."

"Hmm..."

They had also been informed that they were being called together at my request.

The reactions they showed to me, who had received all the shares that Yu Seong Group's VC had possessed, were varied.

They were generally not very welcoming.

Even the executives who were classified as pro-Yu Seong seemed more concerned than anything, wondering what an outsider, even if he was the youngest son of the group's owner, thought he knew that made him want to get involved.

Needless to say, the center of that kind of atmosphere was CEO Seo Jong-won.

Jo Young-cheol, who had readily agreed to my request, was the exception.

In short.

This place was practically the heart of enemy territory.

"Hello, everyone."

But there was no need to feel intimidated.

"I'm Park Yoo-seung. I've received 'all' of the shares of your company that were owned by Yu Seong VC."

The person with the most voting rights in this room was none other than me. Rather, they were the ones who should be watching my every move.

Of course, if the rest of them all joined forces and revolted, nothing would work out, so I was planning on following procedures that everyone could agree on.

"The reason I've asked to meet with you today is because I have a proposal regarding the direction of your company's business."

I displayed the presentation materials that I had prepared on the projector in the conference room.

Graphs and numbers that starkly revealed the company's situation, such as operating profits and capital funds, were neatly organized.

"...The data is quite plausible."

"For something made by an outsider... well, he is the son of the owner family, after all."

I could hear the executives whispering.

"I'll get straight to the point."

I blurted out to them.

"This company. If it continues like this, it's going to fail."

My statement, which was like a direct punch to the solar plexus, sparked a backlash.

"Wh, what did you say?"

Especially from CEO Seo Jong-won.

"What exactly are you talking about?"

"Your company's core service is a character chatbot that utilizes AI."

I started with a story that everyone in this room would know.

"It's a system that allows users to experience a sense of familiarity, emotional connection, and creative story generation by conversing with an AI that feels like a person, and requires paid subscriptions for long-term use."

"That's correct. We're trying to preemptively take over the market before competitors even appear..."

"Why haven't they appeared? Competitors."

I cut off Seo Jong-won's words.

"It's simple. Because it doesn't make money."

"...!"

In reality, Writing's idea wasn't exactly unrealistic.

Conversing with AI was quite a hot topic.

A few years ago, a chatbot service that simply repeated learned conversation patterns, with a famous yellow chick icon, gained national popularity.

A few years after the time setting of "In the Law School."

In other words, in the timeline where I used to live, platforms that achieved commercial success with a business model similar to what Writing had designed had actually started to appear.

However, that was only a story from a few years later.

After much more superior and higher-performance language processing models were released.

"Your company's AI chatbot does not yet provide a sufficiently natural conversational experience."

Awkward English-translated phrases were mixed in, or it would forget the content of the conversation from just a few words ago and give strange answers.

The awkward translation was because they were using a model that operated in English because they couldn't create a Korean model, and the fact that it couldn't remember the conversation was simply a limitation of the early AI's performance.

In short, with the current level of AI, it was impossible to provide users with sufficient immersion.

Rather, it was relatively good at generating texts that summarized formal papers or provided information, but it didn't have the performance to generate everyday and personal conversations.

Because of this, Writing's service was being ignored in the market, receiving reviews like, "It doesn't feel real."

"That part will be explained by CFO Jo Young-cheol."

At that, Jo Young-cheol, who had been sitting there, stood up abruptly.

"As those who know already know, our company's financial situation isn't very good."

Then, he began explaining the data that I had displayed.

His tongue performed a dazzling dance as he spoke of net profits, sales, and debts.

"...Considering these points, it's practically the same as being in a situation where a major transformation is forced."

By the time Jo Young-cheol reached his conclusion, the other executives also had expressions that acknowledged that the problem was serious.

"It's worse than I thought..."

"This is, isn't it dangerous starting next quarter?"

'Hmm. As expected, I should leave this kind of thing to an expert.'

In reality, I didn't know much about the structure of how a company worked.

How much financial analysis could I do, someone who had neither studied business administration nor had any experience running a company?

Even in my past life, I was just an employee, not someone who was in charge of others.

The presentation materials that the executives had been impressed with weren't even something that I had made. Of course, it was Jo Young-cheol's work.

'He's quite a capable talent.'

Jo Young-cheol was an ambitious person.

He was an initial member who had been recruited by Seo Jong-won, but he was growing tired of Seo Jong-won's complacent awareness of reality and his unclear vision.

If he could, he wanted to overthrow Seo Jong-won, take control of the company's real power, and lead it directly in a better direction. That was Jo Young-cheol's true intention.

It was a moment where my interests aligned perfectly with his.

Jo Young-cheol also seemed to think so, and when I contacted him, he welcomed me as if he had met a savior and joined my side.

I would provide a 'means' to reform the company as he wanted, and he would take on the practical process of seizing and reorganizing the organization instead of me, who was an outsider to management.

It was truly a beautiful division of labor.

"Could it be that you knew everything from the beginning and bought our company's shares...?"

"You have terrifying insight."

That was a misunderstanding. I had only poked around because there wasn't any other AI-related company that I could get my hands on.

I didn't even know that the situation would be this bad.

However, I didn't bother to correct them.

There was no harm in increasing my credibility.

Instead, I declared, as if driving in a wedge.

"For your company, change is not a matter of choice. It's an essential requirement for survival."

Even if a startup was a business where they were prepared to lose money and start a new venture, it was still problematic if it would take years for any tangible results to appear.

Rather, they needed to be able to quickly prove their potential to some extent, so that things could at least move forward.

If this kind of performance was made public, Writing would no longer be able to attract the investment that they needed to operate the company, and it would fall apart.

I didn't know much about it, but Jo Young-cheol had explained it that way, so it was probably true.

In the end, it was unavoidable to be forced to completely reconsider the business in any form.

The atmosphere had already turned around a long time ago.

The executives, who had initially shunned the impudent newcomer, were now forced to sympathize with the sense of crisis that I had brought up.

They sent gazes that demanded a solution.

Towards their leader, CEO Seo Jong-won.

"Ha, but."

Seo Jong-won protested as if he was squeezing it out.

"Even so, is there a reason why the direction of that 'change' has to be legal tech?"

It was the same point that he had made before crossing the threshold of the conference room.

"As I said, our company has no experience related to legal tech. Legal tech itself is also a field that is considered something that will only be commercialized far in the future."

As if he was still an industry insider, his argument had clear validity.

"If it's a business that will be slow to see results anyway, is there a need to go out of our way to change it?"

"I agree."

One of the executives also added.

"Of course, we respect the voting rights of Mr. Park Yoo-seung, who is the majority shareholder, but... the ability to point out a problem and the ability to suggest an appropriate alternative are two completely different things."

In short, they had acknowledged the problematic situation that I had exposed, but that didn't mean that the path I was suggesting was necessarily the right answer.

"Please provide evidence."

Riding that wave, Seo Jong-won, who had regained his confidence, demanded from me.

"Evidence that shows that the prospects will improve if we change the business field to legal tech."

* * *

Seo Jong-won thought that this was all a well-crafted game of pretend.

'The youngest son of Yu Seong's owner bought our company's shares?'

What a joke.

There was almost no information known about Park Yoo-seung, the son of the chairman of the Yu Seong Group.

It was a world where you could find all sorts of information on the internet.

If you were a chairman of a group that was within the top ten in the business world, it was natural to be listed in places like biographical encyclopedias or wikis.

In those documents that could be found about Park Geon, it was clearly written, "He has two sons and one daughter."

However, unlike his other two siblings, who had been exposed to the media early on and had been involved in various businesses, the youngest son, Park Yoo-seung, was nowhere to be found.

What that fact indicated was obvious.

'He's a useless young master.'

He must have been incompetent, which was why he hadn't shown any noteworthy achievements that would have revealed his existence.

For that kind of incompetent young master to have gained control of Writing's shares was a tragedy.

It meant that Seo Jong-won's company had been selected as a plaything to be used in a game of pretend by a second-generation chaebol.

'Legal tech, my ass.'

Although it wasn't his specialty, Seo Jong-won, as an IT industry insider and an expert in generative AI, knew very well how absurd the legal tech that Park Yoo-seung was talking about was.

At a glance, AI that handled text and legal services seemed like a perfect match.

If AI could replace some of the work done by legal professionals, whose salaries were absurdly high, that alone would result in tremendous cost savings.

It was an industry that promised enormous profitability.

At the same time, it wasn't a problem that could be approached so simply.

'If it were that easy, everyone would have jumped in already.'

As far as Seo Jong-won knew, the current level of AI couldn't provide any help in solving legal problems.

Of course, if you asked about legal concepts, it could find and spit out the theoretical stories that were written in textbooks.

But that was no different from a simple search engine.

The task of finding the concepts needed to solve a given situation, and putting those logical relationships into a single text without contradiction, was something that was absolutely impossible at the moment.

There was also the problem of hallucinations.

It was a phenomenon where AI generated text that contained strange information that didn't match reality.

There was already a famous picture on the internet of an AI giving a historical question about the early Joseon period and then spouting a bizarre claim that Taejong had used a giant bipedal robot to destroy the barbarians.

It was fine if those errors occurred in the fields of history or general knowledge.

It was just a minor happening that you could laugh about for a moment.

But what if AI were to spew out such errors in legal problems, where each one had a tremendous impact on a person's life?

It would be one thing if it was a problem that anyone could tell was nonsense, like "Armored Taejong," but what if it subtly produced false information in the legal field, where the average person didn't even have the knowledge to distinguish the truth?

That was why, from the moment Park Yoo-seung brought up the topic of legal tech, Seo Jong-won could only treat it as a delusion that a foolish outsider had come up with.

From the start, he himself probably wasn't that serious about it.

At best, it was just a brief amusement.

A plausible toy to play with while he was lost in the illusion of 'doing something.'

But to Seo Jong-won, Writing was a company that was his everything.

'I have to protect it.'

He could still stop it.

Even if the size of the shares that Park Yoo-seung had was large, if he clearly revealed how absurd his thoughts were in this place, he would be able to avoid a situation where the other executives would agree with him.

That was why Seo Jong-won had demanded it from Park Yoo-seung.

Show the evidence.

Show the evidence that it was possible to create something that could be called legal tech in this company.

Of course, there was no way that something like that existed. That was the common sense of the industry.

Unless some genius programmer who had transcended common sense, like someone who might appear in a comic or creative work, was attached to it, it was an absolutely impossible story.

That was why.

"Hi."

When the small woman who had been hiding behind Park Yoo-seung raised her laptop, Seo Jong-won was speechless.

"...Wh, wh, what?"