Ominous Search Terms: Lawyers Professional Indemnity
by Brendon Carr
It’s really interesting what one can find via the server logs. Today I see a global reinsurance company has been browsing Korea Law Blog after finding its way here via Google search for the terms ”lawyers professional indemnity largest claim korea”—yikes. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that search (and I would love to hear it).
To my knowledge there has not yet been a large lawyers’ professional indemnity lawsuit in Korea which has proceeded to judgment. This profession is still far too clubby for that. In fact, very few lawyers carry professional-indemnity insurance, because they are secure in the knowledge that there isn’t any reasonable possibility of a judgment against them. Not because the judiciary will protect them, but because no Korean lawyer will take a professional-indemnity case, least not for a foreign client against a Korean law firm. There is a hell of a lot of malpractice going on here, same as in any other legal market around the world, but as yet it is not subject to meaningful market discipline in the form of monetary damages hanging over the heads of the lawyers.
Things will change. Too many new lawyers are being turfed out into the marketplace for them to maintain that solidarity forever, and the young English-speaking Korean lawyer who carves out the niche as the foreigners’ bulldog for professional-liability cases is likely to have his or her hands full toute suite. But as for today, if you’ve got a large lawyers’ professional indemnity claim and insist that it be handled by one of the major English-speaking international firms in Seoul you’re probably out of luck. I would still love to hear the stories, though.
UPDATE 7/24: I spoke to a partner in passing about this issue, and he said that the issue is not that no Korean lawyer will take a professional-indmenity case, but that lawyers would be extremely reluctant to take a case unless the evidence was clear and convincing. This is, after all, a very small community of less than 10,000 practicing attorneys. There have indeed been professional-liability cases against individual lawyers, for matters relating to mismanagement of client funds, failure to meet filing dates, and similar misconduct, but in respect of cases concerning overlooking legal issues or failure to inform of risks the body of jurisprudence is still quite lacking.
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