The challenge is that Korea and Australia operate under entirely different legal traditions — one civil law, one common — and a word-for-word rendering of a contract doesn't carry the meaning across. Roy built a practice around closing that gap, and AI has changed how fast and how well he can do it.

The instinct of a business owner

A dual law and commerce degree gave Roy two directions to move in, and for a while neither took priority. That shifted through two moments he describes as light-bulb realizations. The first was a mooting competition — “doing a lot of case research, preparation, strategizing, and advocacy in a mock court” — where he found the work genuinely energizing. The second was the nature of law itself: always evolving, always in conversation with how society changes.

The other pull came from home; Roy’s father built a business in Korea from scratch, and Roy grew up wanting the same. “My father was very entrepreneurial and set up his first business at around 28,” he says. “He grew it to be of a decent size in Korea, especially in my town. I thought it was really cool that dad had a business. I think it was as simple as that, and then I always wanted to become a business owner myself.”  When his first role landed him in commercial and property work, the fit became obvious. At 27, he did what his father had done and built something from scratch.

Practising across Korea and Australia: where language meets legal tradition

The cross-jurisdictional dimension of Roy’s work adds a layer most commercial lawyers don't face. Baystone acts only on Australian-law matters, but the majority of its clients are Korean, and explaining Australian legal concepts to them requires more than linguistic fluency. “Australia is a common law jurisdiction, whereas Korea is not,” Roy says. “So literal translations just don’t work.” A term can be rendered accurately and still fail to land, because the client may have no equivalent legal concept in their own system. “What they've been taught in Korea will be very different in Australia.”

The first answer to this complexity is people — three members of Roy's team have direct experience working within Korean corporations and government, and that domain expertise is the foundation. Legora is what lets them deploy it at scale. Run within a single system, a matter can move between Korean and English without the team leaving the tool, their domain expertise overlaid on the output to keep the meaning, not just the words, intact.

The Korean-language workflow

The clearest illustration of how well this works is a recent transaction in which a Korean client was acquiring a minority share in an Australian company. The Australian side produced a convertible note — a standard form, widely understood in Australian practice — whose terms didn't translate cleanly into Korean equivalents. A NAATI-certified translation had been attempted. It wasn't usable. Roy's team put the document into Legora, asked it to summarize in Korean with web research enabled, and had it explain what each Australian concept mapped to in Korean equivalents and why. The output came back with enough accuracy and context to go almost straight to the client.

“It bridges the gap in the cultural difference, but also in the legal context — what different legal concepts are being used in two different jurisdictions,” Roy says. The workflow also removed a structural bottleneck. “Traditionally, you could only have a Korean-speaking lawyer work on this document. Whereas now, by being able to translate frictionlessly, with a Korean domain expert filtering how it should be translated correctly, you can have non-Korean-speaking lawyers on the platform work on this matter.”

A focus on the client

There's a client-service dimension too. Korean clients used to receive a document in English and come back with questions. Now the question is anticipated and answered in the first pass. “We're able to forecast what they would have come back with, and deal with it as a first step,” Roy says. The same workflow runs for Baystone's Mandarin-speaking clients and holds for any practice working across languages and legal systems.

But technology only goes so far. Roy explains that what sits beneath every transaction is interpersonal complexity that no tool can navigate for you. Stakeholder management, he adds, is the most challenging and most interesting part of the work. “No two transactions are the same. No clients are the same. It doesn't necessarily come down to who's the smarter lawyer or the smarter client in the room. It comes down to who's more willing to do a deal, who is more desperate to get this deal done.”

The work is reading what each side actually wants, then moving both toward it. When a deal comes together, the reward is in having engineered it: “You know that you've been an integral part of matching the right pieces of the puzzle.”

The top supports, the lawyers lead

Before choosing Legora, Baystone ran a structured trial: two platforms at once, the same tasks on both, measuring friction and output quality. Legora won on both counts. The decisive feature was the Word plugin — lawyers could prompt Legora to draft what they'd traditionally drafted themselves, and the output was close enough to impress.

On rolling AI out more broadly, Roy draws a firm line: leadership picks the tool, but the people who'll use it must own the rollout. “If you're a professional football player, you don't want to be coached by someone who's never been in a professional league. You almost need to form a project group of lawyers who are going to be the biggest beneficiaries, and get them to lead it, whilst the top supports and drives.”

Mobile, and the changing shape of a working day

Roy uses Legora's mobile app frequently, and it's changed the shape of his day — not how many hours he spends in the office, but what those hours are for. Pre-work that once required a desktop gets done on the move. A call that once required him to be at his desk now gets handled wherever he might be. 

“I've already created a project that has all the documents. So I'll tell the client, hey, just give me one sec. I'll pull it up on my mobile and then I'll ask the questions that the client is asking.” From the client's side, they get the answers right away. “Using the mobile app makes you a more mobile lawyer,” he says. 

“If you're prompting Legora to prepare a draft, you can just do that on your mobile phone and then come back to your desktop to review it. Whereas without the mobile app, you would have to do all of that at your desk and then wait 20 to 30 minutes.”

Advice for younger lawyers

When Roy coaches his juniors, the message he returns to is that the things AI can't do are the things worth getting good at.

Clients are not paying for a document, he explains. They’re paying for someone who can read the room, judge the counterparty and translate legal reality into something that moves a deal. Getting there means building subject-matter depth faster than any previous generation had to.

“With the AI and the tools available out there, you should be expediting your subject-matter knowledge as fast as possible,” he says. “And don't just be a passive passenger watching how others use AI. Use these tools for your actual personal projects, not just your work ones. Understand the extent of possibility. That's what makes lawyers more creative in terms of what they can become.”

“Be extremely curious and be extremely proactive,” he says, “so that you can actually lead, as opposed to just follow.”

What clients can produce, Roy says, is an answer. What they can't produce is the judgment to know if it's the right one, and the skill to carry it forward. That's what the profession will keep being paid for.