South Korea’s One Law Partners is set to merge with Minwho Law Group, an intellectual property boutique, in a deal that will push the combined firm past 100 lawyers for the first time and deepen its bench in the practice areas its leaders believe will define the next phase of legal services: IP, data, and information protection.
The two firms have finalised the key terms of a merger agreement and expect to complete the integration on 1 October 2026. The enlarged practice will keep the One Law Partners name.
The logic, on its face, is the familiar one of consolidation, a full-service firm acquiring specialist depth it lacks in-house. One Law Partners is a mid-sized firm with 79 Korean-licensed attorneys and an established network across corporate advisory, litigation, and public administration. Minwho, founded in 2010, is a lean, technology-focused outfit of six partners and 13 associates with expertise spanning IP, data privacy, IT, personal information regulation, and technology compliance. Adding Minwho’s lawyers, together with the combined firm’s foreign-licensed attorneys, lifts total headcount above 100.
But the framing offered by both managing partners is pointedly about the moment rather than the maths. They cast the tie-up as a response to the AI transition reshaping how legal work is produced and how clients expect to buy it.
“This merger is a strategic move designed to provide more comprehensive and specialised legal services in a shifting market by combining Minwho’s expertise in IP and data privacy with One Law Partners’ extensive corporate network across corporate advisory, litigation, and public administration,” said You-Jung Lee, managing partner of One Law Partners.
Minwho managing partner Kyunghwan Kim framed the decision as a way to widen the boutique’s reach. “I decided to pursue this merger to combine Minwho’s specialised expertise with the established foundation of One Law Partners, enabling the delivery of comprehensive services across a broader range of practice areas,” he said. The integrated firm, he added, aims to set “a new standard for higher-quality legal services that combines technology and expertise while innovating legal services based on AI.”
That ambition will have its first concrete expression on day one. When the merger takes effect on 1 October, One Law Partners says it will launch an “AI Information Security Centre” to tackle the tangle of data, information-protection, and IP questions that AI adoption is generating for Korean corporates, a structural signal that the firm intends to productise the combined expertise rather than fold it into existing teams.
Lee said formal discussions began in February 2026 and that, given the alignment between the two firms, the agreement is “highly unlikely to face any reversal.”
She also made clear that this is unlikely to be the last move. One Law Partners is “keeping the door open to future strategic collaborations or potential integrations with specialised boutique law firms,” Lee said, framing the Minwho deal as one step in a continuing build-out rather than a one-off.
For a Korean legal market where scale, specialisation, and AI readiness are increasingly intertwined, the deal is a small but telling data point: mid-sized firms are using targeted boutique mergers to buy their way into the technology-law practices clients are now demanding, and they are not planning to stop at one.
