싱가포르 국제조정센터 사건으로 본 한국 변호사 윤리 규정의 개선방안에 관한 연구

This study diagnoses structural problems in attorney ethics regulations and proposes improvement measures through analysis of an actual case that occurred at the Singapore International Mediation Centre (SIMC) in 2022. A series of ethical violations that occurred during an international mediation process, where an attorney from a large law firm was appointed as mediator, exposed serious limitations in current attorney ethics regulations. The core problems of the SIMC case are as follows: First, violation of confidentiality duty through the mediator’s indiscriminate disclosure of party information to over a thousand law firm professionals for conflict checking purposes; second, violation of the no-contact rule when a law firm attorney directly contacted mediation parties; third, defamatory conduct in disseminating false information obtained from external sources as if it were fact. Despite these compound ethical violations, the Seoul Bar Association and Korean Bar Association terminated the case without proper review procedures, revealing the powerlessness of the current disciplinary system. This study adopts a comparative legal methodology to analyze and compare California's advanced attorney ethics regulations with the Korean system. By contrasting specific provisions of California Rules of Professional Conduct, including Rule 1.6 (confidential information protection), Rule 2.4 (duties as third-party neutral), and Rule 4.2 (prohibition on contact with represented parties), against Korea’s abstract regulations, this study identifies institutional gaps. Particularly, California’s information barrier system, ethical screening requirements, and expeditious disciplinary procedures are analyzed as best practices for Korea to benchmark. The research findings propose the following major improvements to Korean attorney ethics regulations: First, establishing legal grounds for information barrier systems and reflecting the particularities of international mediation through amendments to Articles 26 and 31 of the Attorney-at-Law Act; second, establishing special provisions for international dispute resolution ethics in the Attorney Ethics Charter and mandating information management systems for large law firms; third, strengthening institutional effectiveness through specification of disciplinary standards and introduction of expeditious disciplinary procedures; fourth, establishing global standards through harmonization with international standards such as the IBA Guidelines. This study makes theoretical contributions by identifying and systematizing new ethical issues in the special context of international mediation, while also providing practical contributions through immediately applicable concrete improvement measures. In particular, detailed guidelines on organizational information management obligations and technical solutions for large law firms can be directly utilized in legal practice. As the internationalization of the legal market accelerates, it is hoped that through the prompt implementation of the improvement measures proposed in this study, Korean attorneys can be recognized as legal professionals possessing both expertise and ethics on the international stage.