Japan's Ministry of Justice reissued its AI legal-services guideline in August 2026, widening what non-lawyers may offer but reserving matters where a dispute has materialised or is near-certain

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Evidence stage

Tasks this bears on

Where this applies

Japan only, and it is the ministry's interpretation of one criminal provision, Article 72 of the Attorney Act, not a court ruling; the guideline says application is ultimately for the courts. Read the direction of travel first, because it runs against what the stage label suggests: this document mostly loosens. It supplements and expands a 2023 guideline that covered contract-document work, and extends the permitted ground to legal work generally, listing research, drafting, review and management of documents, governance, risk and compliance support, internal whistleblowing investigations, business reorganisation support, internal investigations to decide a company's response when trouble arises, and support for shareholder and board meetings. What it reserves is the half this task lives in. A service is outside Article 72 only if it is value-neutral, which the guideline defines as two conditions plus a governance one: its design, core function and technology are not aimed at use for legal business in matters where a legal dispute has actually materialised or is all but inevitable; it carries no features specialised for or contemplating such use; and the provider states plainly that the service does not give legal advice on such matters and reliably directs users to a lawyer when it detects that use. Modality matters here and a summary would flatten it. The Article 72 interpretation is hard, but the governance section is softer: supervision or substantive involvement by a Japanese-qualified lawyer in the service design is called desirable rather than required, though the guideline does insist that expressions suggesting the output provides judgement in place of a lawyer, or guarantees a legal conclusion, be strictly refrained from. What it does not establish: nothing about how much legal work a machine now does in Japan or anywhere, and nothing about headcount. Its duties fall on service providers, not on the lawyer in the room; the reader of this page is protected by it rather than bound by it. Counter-signal, from the same department seven months earlier, in its own submission to the Cabinet Office regulatory-reform working group dated 9 January 2026: it wrote that publication of the guideline may instead have chilled the development and provision of legal-tech services. So the ministry judged its own earlier line to have suppressed adoption, and this document is the answer to that.

What this means

What it does not yet show

It measures nothing. No share of legal work, no hours, no headcount, in Japan or anywhere. It also does not bind you: the duties land on the company selling the software, so a firm that uses such a tool badly is not answering to this document. And the line it draws is a line about what may be sold, not about what a machine can do — the same tool can be capable of the reserved work and still be lawful, provided it is not designed or marketed for it.

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