Archives for August 2008

Top 12 Search Terms for August 2008

by Brendon Carr

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. bob costas plastic surgery
2. bob costas botox
3. bob costas toupee
4. korea law blog
5. bob costas hair
6. korean nudes
7. bob costas surgery
8. rekha sharma nude
9. list of american allies
10. korean law firms
11. brendon carr
12. bob costas cosmetic surgery

Somehow I think the Olympics has raised Bob Costas’ profile in the public consciousness, and not to his advantage either.

August 26, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 comments

Seoul’s Growing Law Firms Finding “No Room at the Inn”

by Brendon Carr

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.

According to the Law Times, the vacancy rate of commercial office buildings with more than 10 storeys is at or below 1%, and fully 65.5% of office buildings across the Seoul metropolitan area have no empty space at all. In Kangnam it’s 71.7% of all buildings; Mapo and Yeoido, 64.9%, and the Central Business District (Kwanghwamun area) 62.6%. But remember that this is across all classes of buildings; in the Class “A” space the ratio of zero-vacancy buildings must be much greater.

Jeong Jin-Kyu, managing partner of the combined DeRyook/Aju law firm which announced its merger last month, told Law Times, “Originally we intended to lease one office north of the [Han] river for the whole combined firm, but the office situation is really serious. We’re not in a position to be taking up spaces all over the place.” He continued, “Regardless of whether in Kangbuk or Kangnam, we have to take up space for 100 lawyers as well as reserve space for anticipated growth. Finding such a place is very difficult.”

The Law Times mentioned the Horizon/Jisung firm as having a similar problem as DeRyook/Aju, being scattered across three offices already in Kangbuk and Kangnam. Bae Kim & Lee is said to have its people in the Hankook Tire Building on Teheran-no, plus three other locations—and Bae Kim & Lee reportedly is growing by 50 lawyers per year.

And, of course, Korea’s largest law firm Kim & Chang, with its 600-some fee earners, has metastasized from the Seyang Building where it started into three other buildings (to my knowledge, the Northgate Building, the Heungkook Insurance Building, and the Naray Building next door to Seyang).

Our own firm Hwang Mok Park PC is in this same bind: In 1999, the firm occupied the entire 9th floor of the Daekyung Building across from Namdaemun (before it burned down last year), and over time grew to take up 1/3 of the 10th floor. Then the Shinhan Bank designated this building their headquarters, and started to squeeze out the other tenants. HMP, when it needed yet more space, was forced to lease offices on the 10th floor of the neighboring Booyoung Building. Those offices now hold 15 lawyers. HMP overleased in the neighboring building, so we have growth space for maybe another 10 professionals. But our lease in the now Shinhan Bank Building is up in 18 months, and there isn’t space in the Booyoung Building for all of us to come over all of a sudden.

Where are the law firms going to end up? The traditional location for corporate law firms is the Kwanghwamun area north of the river, and due to building restrictions very little new supply appears to be available or on the horizon. In the late 1990s, several corporate firms got rooted in Kangnam, south of the river—notably Bae Kim & Lee, but also Yulchon, Yoon Yang Kim Shin & Yu, and Barun Law are all down there. And there’s not so much additional space coming on line down there, either.

In Yeoido, there are two major developments—the AIG International Finance Centre and Skylan Development’s next-door neighbor Parc 1—each of which will dump massive amounts of space onto the Yeoido market starting in 2010. IFC will have 88,000m² (26,667 pyong), while Parc 1 will have 268,000 m² (81,212 pyong) of office space—each in addition to retail and residential/hotel uses. Historically, no major law firm has been officed in Yeoido despite the island having been designated “the Manhattan of Korea”. But all that empty first-class space may entice one, as the Canary Wharf development got some out of the City of London, and the Landmark East and related redevelopments are pulling firms to the Kowloon side in Hong Kong. Hopefully the rates on offer for long-term early occupants will be favorable.

Additionally, there is one other area I can think of that has a lot of empty office space: Sangam-dong, near the World Cup Stadium in Seoul’s northwest corner. There are a number of completely empty, 25-storey buildings available in Sangam-dong. However, this area is far from Kwanghwamun, taking 25-40 minutes by car, and very far from Yeoido and Kangnam (over an hour to each). We have a client that moved over there, and have to visit on a regular basis. With the busiest district court in Seoul down on Teheran-no an hour away, the only law firm that might move to Sangam-dong would be one with a substantial transactional practice and a profile as a firm which could offer economical service due to location—sort of an Eversheds for Korea.

August 25, 2008 | Filed Under Hub of Hubs, Legal Market | 3 comments

More Advice for English Teachers on Employment Relations at Korean Hagwon

by Brendon Carr

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.

English-teacher readers of the employment-law FAQ ought to be aware that while in the main the rules stated therein are generally applicable to their situation, some things might be different in their case. English teachers are not my target audience. Put simply, this is because they have no money—or, rather, not enough money—to pay for legal services to settle their usually very small disputes with the hagwon owner. For example, I fielded one call this year where I determined, after a lengthy discourse on what a horrible bastard the owner was, that the caller sought legal assistance in attempting to force the hagwon to pay £25 for a diploma misplaced by the school. So readers need to be aware that the target audience—managers and in-house counsel supporting multinational corporations’ businesses in Korea—may have different needs from theirs.

Setting aside, for the moment, the far more sensible advice DON’T DO IT! (because at this point prospective teachers are usually wedded to the idea, and being the naysayer is like trying to warn your friend his new fiancée is a horrible shrew), my first advice to someone intending to come teach English in Korea is to forget about the contract. So many aren’t honored and the cost and effort required to enforce a contract is greater than the benefit supposedly to be obtained through enforcement. Think of it as a set of guideposts for best efforts rather than a legally-binding document; I assure you, your Korean employer certainly views your contract this way!

Still, it’s often helpful when begging for promises to be honored to have obtained those promises in writing. Here are the key points to hit:

- If your employer has you shuttling around from site to site between in-class teaching engagements, that time is considered to be work time. If you teach split shifts of three hours at a time, and shuttle around between them, you’re a full-time employee. (Full-time, under Korean law, is more than 15 hours a week, just so you know.)

- You’re entitled to 10 or 15 days paid vacation (depending on whether the employer is on a five day, 40-hour workweek or not); if 10 days, you’re also entitled to one additional paid day off for “monthly leave”, which basically means you work two half-Saturdays instead of four.

- You’re entitled to participate in National Medical Insurance, workers’ compensation, and national pension except if you’re coming from certain countries which have a treaty with Korea on the subject. Unemployment insurance is a different story. Foreign workers generally don’t get unemployment—they get deported.

- You’re entitled to 30 days’ severance pay at the conclusion of the contract, provided you’ve worked a “full year” (which doesn’t mean 365 days exactly, but rather more like 11-1/2 months). Severance pay is never forfeited for any reason.

- You should require the hagwon to pay for your plane ticket in advance if they are promising transportation. Don’t be their lender. If you’re going to be paying for the ticket and being reimbursed, get reimbursed in a few installments at the beginning of the contract (1/3 each of the first three months or something like that) rather than letting the employer hold you hostage for a year waiting to get that ticket money.

Be aware that the Korean-national instructors are in a similar boat to you, but not the same boat. They are also frequently mistreated by their employer, having to endure the same kind of crazy oppression and broken promises—but they are also jealous of the “unearned” benefits that you, the foreign English teacher, receive because of your nationality. For example, a Korean instructor doesn’t get any assistance with housing, while foreign teachers usually do; neither do they get a plane ticket to some exotic foreign destination like your home country. Your salary is also higher than theirs, especially at the entry level. Bellyaching to your co-workers about broken promises is not going to earn you friends.

And finally, have enough money available to walk if you need to. Do not come 5000 miles around the world, to a foreign country, without a cash-advanceable credit card that has about $3500 in available credit on it—so you can have a place to stay, meals to eat, and a return ticket home if you’re screwed over by the hagwon. I get a lot of Friday night calls from desperate hagwon instructors looking for a white knight to intervene and restore order to the world by Monday morning, because the instructor doesn’t have enough money for Cup o’Noodles. And the sad fact is, the legal system doesn’t work with instant remedies, if any remedy is available at all. So there’s nothing I can do for these poor, benighted people.

Your Uncle Brendon can’t help you in the case of a dispute. There are a number of reasons, but the primary one is You can’t afford me and so we’re an employer-side practice. Similar divisions of practice area exist among firms in the US and Canada and elsewhere, so we’re not different. But I have already written here in Korea Law Blog and elsewhere on the web where you should go (and where I’ll be going if I ever become an employment-law plaintiff in Korea—I can’t afford me either) for legal help if you’re a hagwon teacher or company employee in dispute over pay, benefits, or unfair dismissal. (This means although I’ll gladly share what I know and think is relevant here on this blog, English teacher, when you call me in the evenings you’re really imposing on my free time. You’re not a client or potential client. Although I’m too much of a softy to say so directly to those who call, it’s tiresome. So save it for real emergencies, please.)

For the purpose of fairness, in the “Don’t Teach English in South Korea” warning page I linked above, there are a number of hyperbolic statements which are simply not true. It’s not true that if you’re not Korean, you have no legal rights; unless you have the misfortune of getting branded “Enemy of People” the courts are fair and evenhanded on nationality. It’s also not true that an English-language contract is “worthless”. (I’ve covered this in an earlier Korea Law Blog entry this summer.) Still, I have to agree with the overall conclusion, which is that Korea is not a good place for foreign teachers of English to come and work.

August 24, 2008 | Filed Under Employment Law | 1 comments

Understanding Agency, Distribution and Franchise Regulation in Korea

by Brendon Carr

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. So this weekend my associate Sun-Hee Kim and I polished off the sort of stock memorandum that most law firms should have ready to hand on standard topics, but few Korean firms do. Anyone who is interested in the scintillating subject of agency, distribution, and franchise relationships in Korea may download our paper (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 88Kb download).

August 11, 2008 | Filed Under Franchise and Distribution | 1 comments