The war of words between the Korean Bar Association (KBA) and law schools over the appropriate number of annual bar exam passers is intensifying. The KBA argues that the number must be reduced as the domestic legal market faces "structural collapse." Law schools counter that more lawyers should be produced to offset a looming shortage of replacement workforce as older attorneys retire.
The KBA held a rally on Sunday in front of the Government Complex Gwacheon in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province, demanding that "the Ministry of Justice immediately set this year's bar exam passers at 1,500 or below." The association also called on the ministry to "finalize a mid- to long-term supply-demand roadmap that normalizes the annual number of passers to 1,000 or fewer through phased reductions."
The KBA claims that the domestic legal market has entered a stage of "structural collapse" beyond a simple downturn, as the number of lawyers has quadrupled in the 17 years since the introduction of law schools. As evidence, it cited a study titled "Legal Market Structural Changes and Estimation of Appropriate Lawyer Supply Scale" recently published by the Korean Association for Policy Studies. The study found that the domestic legal market is in a state of saturation, with more than 5,000 lawyers oversupplied beyond the appropriate level based on population and economic indicators.
"The average monthly caseload per lawyer has plummeted from 6.97 cases in 2008 to less than 1.0 currently," the KBA said. "Oversupply is seriously threatening not only individual lawyers' right to livelihood but also the public nature of legal services." The KBA's analysis is that declining caseloads have led to excessive competition for cases, which in turn has caused qualitative deterioration and commercialization of legal services, ultimately resulting in infringement of public rights and erosion of trust in the judiciary.
In response, the Council of Law School Deans issued a statement the same day, making its opposition clear by arguing that "demand for legal services will expand going forward." The council cited research by a team led by Professor Kim Du-eol of Myongji University's Department of Economics, which found that domestic demand for legal services — which has shown continuous growth over the past 20 years — is likely to expand further. The council also argued for increasing the production of lawyers, stating that "there is a structural problem of a large-scale replacement workforce shortage due to the retirement of older lawyers after 2030."
The council pointed out that the KBA-cited study "derived Korea's appropriate legal workforce based on trends in the number of lawyers in major global countries, but completely failed to account for differences in legal systems, legal market structures, and professional regulatory frameworks across nations." The council added that "such discussions lack empirical analysis of the drivers behind the approximately threefold growth of the domestic legal market over the past decade or so."