법률분야 전문자격사제도의 개선방안

Legal specialists have performed a pivotal role in protecting the legal rights of the people and bringing social justice. Furthermore, the legal service industry has been used as an intermediate input within the value-chain, contributing to corporate innovation and private sector development. In this regard, establishing an institutional framework for effective delivery of high-quality legal service is a critical agenda for enhancing the growth potential of the Korean economy. The Korean government has put in efforts to enhance the quality of legal professional services through the license systems, such as lawyer, judicial agent, and patent attorney.Commonly, many countries have operated license systems in the legal profession field. Korea, however, has operated these systems in a partly different way compared to other countries, which therefore caused adverse effects against the original purpose of these systems. First, the government has set overly broad exclusive rights for lawyers, judicial agents, and patent attorneys, which as a result caused mismatch between market demand and the actual scope of services provided in the market. Second, despite the relatively large scope of exclusive practice area, the number of legal professionals has been controlled to remain very low. Third, no allowance on the partnership between specialists and nonspecialists or the regulation on their operating type has acted to rule out in advance the opportunities to spread out to other various sectors. Fourth, the government has not come up with enough manpower and budget to conduct ex ante and monitoring and supervision. The government has failed to monitor the performance of legal specialists appropriately. These factors have prevented the public from enjoying the quality legal services in various areas at a reasonable price and also brought many obstacles to the effective operation of the market economy. Therefore, to accomplish a law and order-based sustainable economic growth, the procedures should be made to reform the above problems of the legal specialist system. Concrete measures might include the following: First, the exclusive rights for the legal professions need to be adjusted or reduced to an appropriate level. Second, the current system of determining the number of new legal professionals prior to the examination should be discarded. In addition, it is appropriate to alleviate the government's strict regulations on the quota of law school students. Third, the supervision and control of legal profession should not be conducted through quota regulations or ownership structure control, but through monitoring the service itself directly. In this case, it is prerequisite that the government should secure enough manpower and budget. Fourth, appropriate disciplinary punishments need to be conducted on specialists, if necessary, and concerned information on those punishments should be open to the public in the manner that consumers are allowed to access easily. Lastly, on the premise that the government directly monitors specialists, it is necessary to transform groups of specialists into a voluntary organization so as to enhance the service quality through intra-organization competition.