New postgraduate law schools turn the Korean legal education system on its head as trainee lawyers protest

The annual opening ceremony for Korea's Judicial Research and Training Institute (JRTI) is usually a time for pride. 
To enter the institute's mandatory two-year course and become a Korean lawyer, trainees must first have passed one of the world's toughest Bar exams. Only around one in 10 test-takers succeed.

But at this year's ceremony, held in March, pride was supplanted by protest. More than half of the starting class of 947 boycotted the event.

The trainees were protesting a proposed plan by the Korean Ministry of Justice to hire graduates of Korea's new US-style postgraduate law schools for positions as public prosecutors. In the past, these prestigious and relatively well-paid jobs would have gone only to JRTI graduates.

But new law schools have rocked the Korean legal education system. Previously, law was only an undergraduate concentration. Students had to be admitted specifically to study law – it was a lot harder to get into a top university to study law than, say, music – so people referred to it as law school.

When they graduated, these students took the Korean equivalent of the Bar exam. A small number passed, and these attended the JRTI and were eligible for jobs as lawyers.

But Korea now has postgraduate law schools. The first class will graduate in 2012. Graduates won't have to attend the JRTI. They will take a separate Bar exam to become lawyers.

Korea's new law schools are supposed to supplant the JRTI by 2017, but for now, south-korean-flagboth systems are operating side by side. The clash between the old and new has focused attention on the economic and status anxiety now affecting a group regarded as among the nation's elite.

The small number of Koreans passing Bar exams has long ensured their exalted status. In the 1970s, fewer than 100 per year were permitted to pass the exam and enter the JRTI. The quota was later upped to around 300 and then steadily increased until it reached its current level of 1,000 per year in 2002. Around 10,000 people take the test each year.

But some claim that the system produces lawyers ill-suited to client service and unable to compete with US and UK-trained lawyers in the global marketplace. Among these critics have generally been the heads of large Korean law firms. Bong Hee Han, for example, a founding partner of 250-lawyer Yulchon, advised his daughter, who studied law as an undergraduate at the prestigious Seoul National University (SNU), to join SNU's first law school class instead of taking the Bar and entering the JRTI.

"The JRTI is not the future," says Han, who graduated from the institute himself in 1987. "Korea needs lawyers who have engineering or business backgrounds and who speak English and other languages." The law school system was introduced to produce 
those lawyers.

The problem for all law graduates is that there may not be enough jobs. Already, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, a small proportion of JRTI graduates have failed to find work. Next year, as graduates of the new law schools come into the market, the number of newly minted lawyers looking for jobs will double to 2,500.

Firms can only take a small portion of that number. Kim & Chang, Korea's largest firm, with 520 lawyers, hired only around 30 last year. Hiring by major firms is unlikely to expand much, and other sectors are unlikely to create hundreds of new lawyer jobs. That leaves the Government –which meant that the Ministry of Justice's proposal hit a nerve with JRTI students.

Though short-lived – no further boycotts have taken place – the demonstrations reverberated. The Korean Bar Association and other lawyer groups have issued statements calling on the Ministry of Justice to reconsider its plans. A ministry spokesman says the ministry is still formulating plans with regard to hiring, but that the JRTI protests will not affect any final decision.

Haksoo Ko, a professor and associate dean at SNU Law School, is not so sure. He fears the Ministry of Justice and other government bodies may be sufficiently cowed by the controversy to avoid hiring from law schools. "One ramification may be that the judiciary and the rest of the public sector do nothing [to hire law school graduates]," says Ko.

The protests are not just about career advantage, though. To many, the JRTI stands for a certain concept of opportunity. Anyone can take the Bar exam – former president Roh Moo-hyun famously aced it and became a judge without having graduated from university.

JRTI trainees are paid civil servants, so a humble background is no obstacle to becoming a lawyer. By comparison, law schools require undergraduate degrees and charge tuition, raising fears that, in the future, the legal profession will be reserved for the privileged few.

Eun Young Park, an international arbitration partner at Kim & Chang, came from a modest background, but won a scholarship to attend SNU and then finished near the top of his class at the JRTI. "Though I am a partner at a law firm now, when I was a student I had nothing," he says. "I'm very indebted to the system."

His experience gives Park mixed feelings about the current debate. "We need more lawyers who can assist the economy, but we also need to preserve fairness in the system," he says. "So far, nobody has provided a clear solution to these issues."

This article first appeared in The Asian Lawyer, a US affiliate title of Legal Week.