Lee Jong-yeop, President of the Bar Association, "Reduce the Number of Bar Exam Passers to 1,200 and Abolish the Law School Vacancy Replenishment System"

"Ministry of Justice Shifts Practical Training Burden to Bar Association... Disrupted Operation Inevitable"
"Suspend Extension of Vacancy Replacement System and Activate Statutory Transfer Admission System"

Lee Jong-yeop, the newly appointed president of the Korean Bar Association, is being interviewed by Asia Economy on the 26th of last month. Photo by Moon Ho-nam munonam@

[Asia Economy Reporter Choi Seok-jin] The number of successful candidates in the bar exam, which was around 1,500 in the early stages of implementation, steadily increased to 1,599 in 2018, 1,691 in 2019, and 1,768 in 2020.

On the other hand, many practicing lawyers are at a disadvantage in competition due to the encroachment of the legal market by platform companies pursuing profit backed by huge capital, struggling in both litigation and advisory markets.

Lee Jong-yeop, President of the Korean Bar Association, diagnosed, “The current legal market is like a distorted law school system operation, a new device, that is, pouring water into a bucket called the legal market with a pump.” He argued that to normalize the domestic legal market, the number of bar exam passers should be reduced to 1,200. He stated that the distorted vacancy replenishment system to cover law schools’ finances must be abolished for law schools to be normalized.

President Lee said, “The government passed an enormous number of 1,768 candidates in last year’s bar exam, but nearly half of these new lawyers, about 800, could not secure the mandatory six-month practical training positions required by law, and their practical training was dumped on the Korean Bar Association. Currently, it is impossible to conduct legitimate lawyer training for this year’s bar exam passers.”

The Ministry of Justice drastically cut the national subsidies for practical training for passers paid to the Bar Association since 2016 and completely stopped the subsidies in 2020. Due to the surge in the number of passers and training applications exceeding capacity, the Bar Association’s training was conducted illegally and chaotically.

President Lee emphasized, “The maximum number of people who can legally and substantively undergo training through legal service institutions is only 200. Therefore, the number of bar exam passers should be limited to a maximum of 1,200, combining 1,000 who can be absorbed by the current legal market and 200 who can be accommodated by the Bar Association’s training.”

The vacancy replenishment system is pointed out as a cause of lax law school management and oversupply of lawyers. This system allows law schools to fill vacancies caused by non-registration or withdrawal with students up to 10% of the total admission quota in the following year’s entrance exam. It was temporarily introduced to stabilize the system in the early stages of law school implementation.

However, the Ministry of Education announced a revision of the enforcement decree to extend the validity of the vacancy replenishment system for four years until the 2024 admission screening, and despite opposition from the legal profession, a revision extending it for two years until 2022 was recently passed at the Cabinet meeting.

It is criticized that by blocking a transfer admission system that aligns with competitive principles and supplementing the quotas of law schools with vacancies, the system effectively increases the quotas. Ultimately, it is argued that the system maintains a distorted law school structure by supporting the finances of law schools and keeping lower-tier law schools afloat, and thus abolition is the correct answer.

President Lee said, “Continuing to extend the vacancy replenishment system by enforcement decree instead of the transfer admission system stipulated by law not only contradicts the constitutional intent of declaring ‘legalism in the education system’ but also strongly contains unconstitutional elements as it evades the legislative intent of the law regulating law school quotas.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.