Hidetoshi Yokoyama, Chairman and CEO of Robot Consulting Inc.

"Robot lawyers bring the law closer to you"

Chairman and CEO of Robot Consulting Inc.　Hidetoshi Yokoyama(Hidetoshi Yokoyama)

■ Profile
In 2020, he founded Robot Consulting, Inc., a company that develops and provides AI services, primarily related to legal tech, and is serving as its founder and chairman.

Robot Consulting, Inc. aims to utilize AI to provide legal consultations that are free and accessible to everyone. Chairman and CEO Hidetoshi Yokoyama, who has set his sights on combining AI and law in the current AI era, says, "There is no human being who is not governed by the law." We spoke with Yokoyama about the background to his founding, the appeal of robot lawyers, and his outlook for the future.

■ Foresight honed through investment

While it's common for people to go on to university after graduating from high school, I wanted to make a name for myself in Tokyo, Japan's largest and most economically dynamic city. My part-time job after graduating high school was to save up money to move to Tokyo. After moving to Tokyo, I met a famous stock trader, which opened the door to my career as an investor. Stocks available for investment include everything from IT to automobiles, healthcare, and real estate, and their rise and fall is influenced by trends, economic prospects, and the economy. Having the ability to spot new trends is important, and while the IT industry was perceived as something completely different and sinister 20 years ago, I've witnessed the changing times, with landlines replacing home phones with cell phones and smartphones, and every household having a computer. I believe these experiences and investments have honed my foresight and economic sensibility.

■ Focus on digital transformation of professional services

The work of social insurance labor consultants and lawyers still relies on paper. Defense documents, evidentiary documents, and lawsuits, in particular, are all handled on paper and sent to court via fax. As a result, most offices still have fax machines, and digital transformation has not progressed. There was a recent issue with the delay in COVID-19 relief payments, but I believe that was also the result of slow progress in digital transformation of government infrastructure. When I started my business, I thought it would be a good idea to first digitalize these areas. I noticed that while there are many AI companies, there are still very few in the legal field. Furthermore, no one is unaffected by the law in their lives. For example, we all work under the Labor Standards Act, and everyone lives by the rules of the law. In other words, ignorance of the law puts you at a disadvantage. That's why I wanted to combine AI with the law to make it more accessible and accessible.

■Robot lawyers who provide free legal advice 24 hours a day

According to some data, in Japan, for every 10 people who want to consult, only about one has actually consulted a lawyer. This means that nine people end up just putting up with their problems. The reasons for this are likely due to various hurdles, such as not knowing which lawyer to go to and the high cost of legal fees. That's why we're developing a service that uses AI to connect people with lawyers via chatbots. Meeting a lawyer face-to-face can be daunting, and in this digital age where phone calls can be stressful, rather than talking about unpleasant things directly, if you could easily consult with a lawyer at any time using just your mobile phone, your case could progress without meeting with a lawyer. While lawyers may respond via chat, there are very few services like ours that use AI-powered language models (LLM) technology to connect people with the right lawyer, which is a unique advantage compared to other services.
While the content of consultations varies from person to person, the concerns of young people and middle-aged people are different. I think that today's bar associations have a business model that focuses on the concerns of middle-aged people, such as claims for overpayment and divorce. However, young people, who are part of the digital generation and are accustomed to computers and smartphones, tend to have troubles on the internet and social media. Therefore, I think that bot-type robot lawyers, which can be easily used 24 hours a day, free of charge, could open up a new market.

■ Future outlook

The company's vision is to expand into the global market despite being a Japanese legal tech startup.The goal is to expand.Ultimately, we aim to develop the robot lawyer as a service that can learn the laws of countries around the world and support each country's language, so we hope that by taking on the US market, the world's largest legal tech country, we can help promote the global expansion of Japanese startups.

■Messages from university students

In the coming era, human relationships will become more tenuous, so I feel we need to pursue a more human way of life. The more AI advances, the greater the demand for a more human way of life, so perhaps we are entering an era in which we must reexamine what it means to be human. Studying alone and going to college is no longer enough to guarantee lifetime happiness. There was a time when large companies needed many university students and many talented people, but when all of that is replaced by AI, and AI proves to be superior, more cost-effective, and can be replaced by large companies, I think we need to think more about what humans can do. Personally, as AI advances, I believe that the type of people I want to work with are those who are honest and genuine.

Student Newspaper Online December 6, 2024 Interview by Toyo University sophomore Rinno Koshiyama

Daiki Shimada, fourth-year student at Hosei University / Rinno Koshiyama, second-year student at Toyo University / Satoru Sudo, fourth-year student at Rikkyo University