International Law

Beware of Grey Market/Parallel Imports to Korea if You Want Warranty Service

Posted on April 15, 2010
One of the fun things about living in Korea is the opportunity to pay more for just about everything one might purchase. Prices here are higher for food (much higher for food), clothing, electronics, and cars than just about anywhere else in the world...

Hello world!

Posted on April 07, 2010
I think I’m going to start blogging again. This time I’ll be more resistant to brickbats thrown by the English-teacher set.

Hello world!

Posted on February 11, 2010
Welcome to WordPress.

Wherein I Get Sick of Korea Law Blog

Posted on June 01, 2009
As you can tell, Korea Law Blog is pretty moribund. I’ve simply decided that my opinion on legal matters is not a matter of urgency for all people. That said, I think I might be interested in keeping a generalized blog under a different URL, one which would accommodate my opinions on cats, bacon-flavored mayonnaise, and such matters—including politics and Korean legal matters...

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SsangYong Motor Situation Getting Tricky

Posted on December 26, 2008
SsangYong Motor Company (SYMC), Korea’s fifth carmaker and a holdover “zombie” company from the 1998 financial crisis, appears to be on the brink of bankruptcy, with its major shareholder Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, apparently having had enough of the company and its union, threatening to walk away from the company and to allow the company to go bankrupt...

Seoul High Court: HIV Not Justifiable Reason for Deportation

Posted on November 13, 2008
Some good news for a change: The Seoul High Court has ruled that foreign residents of Korea cannot be deported simply because of testing HIV positive, according to a report in the Law Times I noticed today. The High Court, an intermediate appellate court, affirmed a district court ruling in favor of a Chinese migrant laborer, a Mr...

Temporary Employees, Contract Employees: Two Years Only

Posted on November 10, 2008
Anyone doing business in Korea quickly becomes familiar—sometimes through painful experience—with the extreme legal protection of employees’ “right” to continued employment. Requiring “just cause” to terminate an employee under the Labor Standards Act (LSA), Korea has created a system of employment for life...

Samsung No. 1 in US Mobile Phone Market; Korean Market Remains Basically Closed

Posted on November 09, 2008
And I think this could quite quickly become a trade irritant if anybody in Washington notices. The local papers are crowing that in the third quarter tally, Samsung Electronics achieved for the first time the number one sales position in the United States, bumping American phone maker Motorola to number two...

A Sad Story of Internet Fraud: Beware Steve Kim of Daekwang Corp.

Posted on November 07, 2008
A couple of days ago some Korea Law Blog reader found me with this common tale of woe: This is a long shot but I found you through Google (korealawblog.com) and thought I’d take a shot. To make a very long story short, I wired $3800usd to an individual who goes by the name Steve Kim...

Korean Bankruptcy Wave Starts to Mount Again

Posted on November 06, 2008
As the credit crunch starts to bite in the real economy, and Korea’s position becomes more precarious, corporate bankruptcies start to mount. Today I saw the following short report in the English Chosun Ilbo: More Companies File for Protection An increasing number of recession-hit businesses are going belly-up...

Korean Prosecution Studying Introduction of Plea-Bargaining System

Posted on November 01, 2008
Because criminal law has so much greater reach in Korea, touching on a wide variety of business conduct (such as wrongful termination, non-payment of wages, default on payment obligations, or not having the proper markings on your website, or using improperly-sized tires on the car) which might more readily be addressed by civil process in common-law countries such as the United States, we end up doing a fair bit of criminal-law counselling of business clients...

Korea All Over This Week?s Forbes (in Asia, at least)

Posted on October 27, 2008
My copy of Forbes Asia, dated October 27, 2008 turned up on Friday (no doubt having taken a detour somewhere around the office), but I only got around to looking at it over lunch. There are two good Korea-related pieces in this issue. First up, Don Kirk took a trip to North Korea to visit the site of renewed construction at Pyongyang’s Ryugyong Hotel, the ghostly unfinished shell of a 102-storey hotel the construction of which was abandoned in 1992 after the collapse of worldwide communism left North Korea in a pinch—the markets for its odd industrial products, itchy blankets and ill-fitting suits having been lost when the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost...

Dominance of SKY Universities Nearly Complete in Legal Profession

Posted on October 25, 2008
Anyone who’s had contact with Korean society for any period of time will be familiar with the importance of school networks, and, thus, the university entrance examination. An unholy triumvirate of three universities in the capital—Seoul National University (“S”), Korea University (“K”), and Yonsei University (“Y”)—has such a hammerlock on influence and power that teenagers will sit out a year and try again on the test rather than go to a “lesser” university, or commit suicide out of hopelessness over their lot in life without a SKY diploma...

Korean Youth Losing Grip on Traditional Morality

Posted on October 23, 2008
The Korean branch of Transparency International announced the stunning results of a survey of 1100 middle and high-school students where the students were posed questions of morality and ethics, according to the JoongAng Ilbo English edition. Shockingly, more than half of the students disapproved of excusing criminal activity by leaders who have contributed to the people’s well-being...

Blind Candidate Passes Bar Exam for First Time

Posted on October 23, 2008
The Korea Times, taking a break from its riveting 467-part series on “national branding”, caught up to other media outlets including the Law Times and the Chosun Ilbo in reporting the achievement of 27 year-old Choi Young in passing the bar examination’s two-stage written portion...

What the Won?s Collapse Means for the Korean Legal Market

Posted on October 12, 2008
Last week, the Korean won cratered against the US dollar, plumbing depths of weakness not seen since 1998. The won flirted with closing below 1400 to the dollar. The government, of course, after telling us everything’s okay, is now trying to talk the won back up to W1000 to the dollar...

Dongwon Tuna Closes on Purchase of StarKist

Posted on October 10, 2008
This one’s a little braggy, but my partner Doil Son and our fine team of associates worked so hard on this deal it merits mention on Korea Law Blog. Recently, among other events, we’ve been lucky enough to work on one of the major outbound investment deals: Hwang Mok Park PC advised Korean fishery company Dongwon Enterprise Co...

Shutdown Allowances Under Korean Law

Posted on October 09, 2008
This morning a client got in touch with what I fear may be an all-too-common issue: Headquarters wants all offices worldwide—including the client’s Korea branch office—to close up for a month, with staff on unpaid leave, as a cost-containment measure in response to the credit crunch...

Major Overhaul of Korea?s Civil Code Forthcoming From 2009

Posted on October 08, 2008
For the first time since the Korean Civil Code was last overhauled in 1958, the basic statute of Korean laws will be overhauled completely from 2009-2012, reported the Law Times yesterday. The scholarly effort will be similar to the epochal Restatements of the Law undertaken by the American Law Institute, in that the forthcoming changes to the Korean Civil Code will aim to reduce to clear, concise language principles of law already developed through case precedents since 1958 but not codified into law...

Computer Security As Fraud Preventative

Posted on September 27, 2008
Korea’s government has finally woken up to e-mail’s role in official communications, and banned government employees from the use of free web-based e-mail services for official duties, reports the Korea Times. Additionally, the government is instituting more stringent data-security practices—controlling access to files on government servers, limiting the use of USB flash-memory sticks, and blocking connections to web-based file-exchange services like WebHard (http://www...

Why Ambulance Chasing Doesn?t Pay in Korea

Posted on September 24, 2008
This short bit in the Korea Times piqued my interest, as it illustrates why English-speaking lawyers aren’t standing by to right every wrong against Korea’s long-suffering foreign teachers of English: Doctor Blames for Suicide Stemming from Wrong Diagnosis A hospital is partially responsible for a patient’s suicide if the suicide was committed after a doctor’s wrong diagnosis, according to a court ruling Tuesday...

Americans Overseas: Register and Vote

Posted on September 19, 2008
[This entry will stay top of the page through Nov. 4.] We all know this election is important. Every election for the Presidency is an important one, but perhaps this November is especially crucial. As an American citizen overseas, you still have the right—and moral obligation—to vote for the candidates of your choice...

Some Lawyers Struggling to Make a Living

Posted on August 31, 2008
The execrable Korea Times reports a polarizing legal community, where solo and small-firm lawyers struggle to survive and others—those in larger law firms—prosper. In other words, a real marketplace, with winners and losers. The current Korean legal market is a far cry from the not-too-distant past, when simply passing the bar exam was an achievement which more or less guaranteed a lifetime of prosperity and prestige...

Top 12 Search Terms for August 2008

Posted on August 26, 2008
Reading the referrer logs and web statistics for search terms gives one a keen insight into what concerns web surfers. Knowing what brought visitors to the site allows a blogger to tailor the content to what’s been demonstrated to be in demand. Here’s the top 12 searches that brought visitors to Korea Law Blog so far this month: 1...

Seoul?s Growing Law Firms Finding ?No Room at the Inn?

Posted on August 25, 2008
Trumpeting Large Law Firms “One Family Under Three Roofs”, the Law Times reported Thursday on a phenomenon of relevance to all law firms in Seoul, including the foreign law firms supposedly salivating just outside the gates: Seoul’s office buildings are bursting at the seams, and law firms are finding it impossible to locate places with enough space to accommodate their growing numbers...

More Advice for English Teachers on Employment Relations at Korean Hagwon

Posted on August 24, 2008
This weekend I got a nice message from a Korea Law Blog reader thanking me for the Korea employment law FAQ in the sidebar. It’s a popular download, with about 1000 visitors having taken the time to download over the last year. The reader, a foreign teacher of English about to sign a contract and come over to Korea to teach, asked whether it would be worthwhile to have a lawyer look over the contract before executing it...

Understanding Agency, Distribution and Franchise Regulation in Korea

Posted on August 11, 2008
This comes up from time to time in our practice, but infrequently enough (maybe once a year for me, as I do inbound FDI/M&A work and employment law mostly) that when a colleague in Europe asked if we had a throwaway overview memorandum to give, I had to confess that no, we did not...

Oops! They Did It Again

Posted on July 29, 2008
Law firm mergers seem to be coming on a daily basis, or at least as often as the Law Times turns up on my desk (twice weekly). This time it’s Kim Chang & Lee ("Korea’s oldest law firm") and Kim & Company who are merging to form a 40-something mid-sized firm, also with ambition to double its mass in the next two years...

That?s Right: When You?re in a Hole, Keep Digging

Posted on July 28, 2008
Business-friendly Pres. Lee Myung-bak has surrendered to the street protestors, and it looks like they’ll get their wish for autarky. What makes me say this? Foreign investment interest in Korea has all but evaporated, and your international reputation for rule of law has been made a joke by your continued legal harassment of Lone Star Funds? Trying to convince foreign investors with the Big Lie that everything’s okay, and Korea welcomes foreign capital to its “level playing field”? Although I am sure this will get me in trouble with Korea Law Blog reader H...

Law Firms? Urge to Merge Continues

Posted on July 27, 2008
It’s been a hot summer for the legal market, with firms merging and combining all over. On Friday I noticed the trade newspaper Law Times reporting that Korean law firms continue seeking critical mass: A three-way merger between Hanbit Law Group, Saegil Patent & Law Firm, and Law Offices of Ha-Yeon Cha, which brings into being a new, 46-member mid-sized firm (with just two foreign legal consultants, so far as I can see, so job-hunters, hint hint...

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