The New York State Bar Association said Monday that it has reached deals with two major bar associations in South Korea and Japan.

In an interview, the state bar's president, Hank Greenberg, a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig in Albany, said he was hopeful the deals would help expand membership and open doors to similar agreements around the world.

The state bar's memorandums of understanding with the Seoul Bar Association and the Dai-Ichi Bar Association of Tokyo—deals that are expected to be signed later this week—call for exchanges of lawyers, publications and event information between the bar associations.

According to the state bar, the Seoul Bar Association has more than 20,500 members. The Dai-Ichi Bar Association is one of three Toyko bar associations, Greenberg said, all of which share the same building. It has about 5,600 members and has a record of building bridges internationally, he said.

The state bar's annual meeting in Manhattan on Monday. Photo: Russ DeSantis Photography and Video LLC

Down the road, the memorandums of understanding may grow into something like reciprocal membership deals, Greenberg said. "I am hopeful that we will soon be able to roll out agreements we strike with these bar associations, not just MOUs," Greenberg said.

Greenberg said the arrangements with the bar groups in Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo are the first steps in a "global membership initiative."

According to the New York bar group, some 26,000 New York-barred attorneys reside outside of the U.S., but only 3,500 of them are members of the New York State Bar Association. The ultimate goal is to grow the bar group's reach to include more lawyers in foreign countries, Greenberg said. He revealed the memorandums of understanding at a luncheon of the state bar's international law section on Monday and said "the crowd welcomed it."

"These agreements give us footholds, opportunities, to begin to grow membership," he said. He said negotiations were ongoing with the Nigerian Bar Association and said he hoped to get talks going with bar associations in Spain and Portugal on the occasion of the state bar's international law section's meeting in Madrid in March.

Greenberg credited Hyun Suk Choi of the law firm Choi & Park, a co-chair of the state bar's membership committee, as being "instrumental" in the outreach to Asia.