International Law

Korea, Land of 10,000 Lawyers

It’s good to have friends who know what I like. While I’ve been swamped today (for three weeks running, really, since I foolishly took a few days to attend a short conference in China) working on a securities-law matter, Korea Law Blog readers have been forwarding interesting law-related tidbits. (I also got a complaint from an old Navy buddy who says it figures that your Uncle B would have a “Korea Law Blog” with little law-related content. So this comes just in time!)

The Chosun Ilbo English edition reports that Korea now has 10,000 private-practice attorneys:

Nation’s Lawyers Top 10,000 Mark

In 1906, Korea produced its first three lawyers. Now, 102 years later, the number of lawyers in the nation has topped 10,000.

According to the Korea Bar Association, the number of registered lawyers in the country reached the 10,000 mark as of April 1 and totaled 10,127 on Monday. This is 27 years after the figure reached 1,000 in 1981, and six years after it reached 5,000 in 2002.

Korea’s new American-style law schools will begin producing about 2,000 graduates every year from 2012, so the nation’s army of lawyers will likely exceed the 20,000 mark by 2015.

The country produced its first female lawyer in 1954. The number of women lawyers in Korea crossed the 100 mark in 1999, and the figure is expected to reach 1,000 this year, the KBA said.

The prevailing trend in the legal industry is toward large firms with multiple attorneys working together in the same office. In 2003 there were just 250 law firms in the country; that figure topped 400 this year. In fact some 55 to 60 percent of all lawyers in the country work in firms.

But experts point out that there still aren’t enough lawyers to meet Korea’s demand for quality legal services. Even with 10,000 lawyers there’s just one for every 4,800 people. The OECD average as of 2006 was one for every 1,482 people.

Another chronic problem is the excessive concentration of lawyers in the Seoul metropolitan area. Of the nation’s 10,000 lawyers, about 6,200 belong to the Seoul Bar Association. It is estimated that about 50 percent of local administrative regions nationwide have no lawyers at all.

No kidding. Lawyers don’t want to get far from Seoul. Sixty-two hundred in the Seoul Bar Association—how many in the Incheon and Kyonggi Province Bar Associations? These are basically the outskirts of Seoul. I’d bet those two have another 2500 members.

It’s important to note that these figures do not include judges and public prosecutors as “lawyers”—this is a private-practice headcount only. And foreign-admitted legal consultants certainly aren’t included either. Still, the number 10,000 is still just a drop in the bucket. My Washington State Bar Association number, from 1997, is 27252—and Washington has only about 4.5 million people.

The bar admission number has been increasing by 1000 a year the last five years (not all of them went into private practice, though; some become judges and prosecutors). Before that it had climbed to 1000 from a level of only 300 per year. So the bar association skews quite young—or at least new. What this means is that the population of experienced lawyers, to say nothing of English-speaking experienced lawyers, is still extremely constrained—there is still a need for Uncle B and also for opening of the Korean market to foreign law firms.

Full post as published by Korea Law Blog on April 30, 2008 (boomark / email).