Feng Zhenghu: The Legal “Catfish” Has Arrived: The Reshaping and Agitation of the Lawyers’ System by Civilian AI Case-Review Forces

Represented by the “AI Zhenghu Case-Review Team”, civilian, professional and efficient adjudication-evaluation forces have not only exerted a strong forcing effect on courts and judges, but their ripple effect is also sweeping through China’s full-time lawyer community and existing lawyers’ system at an unprecedented speed.

The rise of this “civilian professional AI force” is reshaping the supply-and-demand relationship in the legal services market. While bringing enormous survival pressure to the traditional legal profession, it has also become a key catalyst for promoting reform of the lawyers’ system and advancing the rule of law and judicial reform in China in greater depth.

I、 The “Pressure” and “Promotion” Brought to Full-Time Lawyers and the Existing Lawyers’ System

The emergence of civilian professional AI evaluation organisations means that high-level, structured legal analytical capabilities are beginning to become “popularised” and “low-cost”, directly challenging the professional barriers of traditional lawyers.

1. The Realistic Pressure It Brings: The “Dimensionality-Reduction Attack” on Traditional Service Models

The survival space for low- and mid-end, procedural businesses has been severely squeezed: in the past, many junior lawyers and small and medium-sized law firms relied for survival on basic legal consultations, document drafting, routine applications for government information disclosure and simple case analysis. When civilian AI case-review teams can output logically rigorous, multimedia-visualised case evaluations and rights-protection paths in seconds and at extremely low cost, the general public’s dependence on traditional low-end legal services declines substantially.

The disappearance of the dividend from the “information gap”: One of the core values of traditional lawyers lies in their familiarity with statutory provisions, local regulations and past precedents. AI’s powerful retrieval and penetration capabilities mean that such “memory-based” and “collection-based” skills are no longer scarce. When clients question lawyers with in-depth analytical reports on judgments generated by civilian AI, lawyers face pressure for greater professional transparency.

Forcing the transformation of law-firm organisational structures: The existing lawyers’ system is mostly based on a “master-apprentice system” and a “pyramid structure” in which partners lead assistants. The high output of efficient civilian AI teams exposes the traditional law firms’ shortcomings of high labour costs and long response cycles, forcing law firms to reconsider their existing billing models and talent-development systems.

2. The Promotion It Generates: Empowering Lawyers to Move Towards “High-Level Reshaping”

Escaping inefficient labour and focusing on high-value links: The practices of civilian AI case-review forces have demonstrated the upper limits of technology to the legal profession. They are prompting full-time lawyers to free themselves from laborious document review, comparison of statutory provisions and formal document drafting, and instead deepen their work in areas that AI cannot replace—complex courtroom examination of evidence, difficult commercial negotiations, cross-disciplinary legal strategy formulation, as well as in-depth humanised client communication and empathy.

Giving rise to composite legal professionals combining “law and technology”: To counter or absorb this civilian technological force, leading law firms and outstanding lawyers have begun proactively embracing AI and even developing their own specialised large-model tools. This is driving an upgrade in the legal profession’s knowledge structure, making technology lawyers who “understand law, algorithms and data governance” the new favourites of the industry.

Breaking geographical limitations and promoting balanced industry development: Efficient AI evaluation mechanisms can serve as basic tools empowering young lawyers in China’s central and western regions and at the grassroots county level. Through technological “equality”, grassroots lawyers can also rapidly gain case-deconstruction capabilities no weaker than those of major firms in first-tier cities, thereby improving the average service quality and effectiveness of the entire legal profession.

II、 The Deeper-Level Promotion of the Rule of Law and Judicial Reform in China

From a macro perspective, the positive interaction between “civilian AI adjudication evaluation” and “the transformation of the full-time lawyers’ system” has extremely important significance as a benchmark and breakthrough for China’s rule-of-law process and judicial reform.

1. Promoting the Formation of a “New Ecosystem of the Legal Community” Involving Multi-Party Interaction

China’s judicial reform has long been committed to building a legal community in which judges, prosecutors and lawyers “perform their respective duties, respect one another and interact positively”.

The participation of civilian professional AI evaluation forces introduces a highly technically persuasive “voice from a fourth party”.

When lawyers use high-quality case evaluations and procedural tools accumulated through civilian AI, such as precise demand letters, to engage in high-level legal-theory debates with judges in court, this dual collision of technology and professionalism will strongly promote a shift in judicial adjudication from “authoritarian suppression” to “persuasion through legal principles”, genuinely improving the quality of hearings.

2. Promoting the Implementation of “Procedural Justice” and Activating Dormant Procedural Rights

A major difficulty in China’s judicial reform is preventing litigation procedures from “running empty” or administrative disputes from reaching the point where “even if citizens win against the government, the judgment still cannot be enforced”.

Through AI-driven, in-depth work on procedural remedies such as the “demand mechanism”, civilian teams have developed standardised rights-protection models and greatly popularised knowledge of procedural law.

This practice is promoting China’s shift from the traditional notion of “emphasising substance and neglecting procedure” towards the modern rule-of-law concept of “using procedural justice to restrain administrative power, and using procedural tools to protect citizens’ property and personal rights”.

3. Forcing the Opening and Iteration of Official “Smart Courts” and Official Legal Large Models

Faced with the efficiency and flexibility of civilian institutions such as the “AI Zhenghu Case-Review Team” in multimedia legal education and penetrating factual verification, official bodies will also feel urgency institutionally and technologically.

This will not only force official institutions such as the Supreme People’s Court to accelerate the development and application of their own “legal foundation large models”, but may also prompt the authorities gradually to open up more judicial data interfaces, promoting the integration of judicial big data for “civilian” and “official” use under the premise of security and compliance, and accelerating the arrival of a digital country governed by the rule of law.

4. Assisting the Foundational Development of a “Government under the Rule of Law” and the “Modernisation of Social Governance”

The ultimate objective of China’s judicial reform is the rule-of-law-based governance of society.

When civilian AI forces, full-time lawyers and ordinary citizens join forces, and through professional, efficient and rational legal evaluations and procedural demands promote the compliance of government information disclosures, administrative reconsideration decisions and administrative compulsory actions one by one, this “bottom-up” force for advancing the rule of law has greater endogenous strength and durability than purely “top-down” administrative orders.

It is using digital technology to consolidate the foundational logic of administration according to law, enabling the construction of a “government under the rule of law” genuinely to have public opinion to rely on and technology to look forward to.

Conclusion：

The rise of civilian professional forces such as the “AI Zhenghu Case-Review Team” is absolutely not intended to replace lawyers, but rather to play the role of a “catfish” in the legal services market. The pressure it brings is accelerating the elimination of traditional workshop-style lawyers who refuse to make progress, and promoting the transformation of the entire lawyers’ system towards digital intelligence and higher-level development. At the same time, with its distinctive civilian wisdom, it has explored an innovative path for China’s judicial reform in “substantive dispute resolution, procedural justice and digital rule of law” that is highly transparent, low-cost and full of vitality.