Kim Young-hoon, New Bar Association President: "Legal Market, a Monopoly of Virtuous Lawyers"

Kim Young-hoon, the newly appointed president of the Korean Bar Association, stated on the 27th that "the strict response policy toward private platforms will be continued."

The newly appointed president of the Korean Bar Association is delivering an inaugural speech at the 2023 KBA General Assembly held on the 27th at Lotte Hotel, Sogong-dong, Seoul. / Provided by the Korean Bar Association [Image source=Yonhap News]

At the 2023 Korean Bar Association regular general meeting held at Lotte Hotel in Sogong-dong, Seoul, Kim, in his inaugural speech, likened lawyers to "Seonbi" (scholars) and private legal platforms such as LawTalk to "merchants," expressing his determination to block the entry of private platforms.

Kim said, "I feel a heavy responsibility as the president of the association in the face of the members' solemn will to unwaveringly protect the lawyer system," adding, "The legal market has originally been a monopoly market of lawyers defined as 'Seonbi.' The issue is that 'merchants,' whose goal is profit, have recklessly entered and are attacking the Bar Association, which opposes them, as if they were the owners."

He continued, "Publicness and independence are values that cannot be given up in the legal profession," and warned, "However, in the worst-case scenario, if the government forces lawyers to compete with merchants, we will prepare to break the shackles of publicness imposed on lawyers to enable free competition as merchants."

Recently, the Bar Association decided to discipline lawyers who joined LawTalk but was sanctioned by the Fair Trade Commission. In response, the Bar Association announced plans to file a lawsuit and request a jurisdictional dispute adjudication at the Constitutional Court.