Digital Platform Data Breaches and Procedural Inequality ― Rethinking the Role of e-Discovery in South Korea in Light of the Coupang Customer Data Leak ―

Digital platforms increasingly function as central repositories and gatekeepers of vast quantities of personal data, fundamentally reshaping the evidentiary landscape of civil litigation. In cases involving large-scale data breaches, legally relevant facts concerning the cause, scope, and responsibility for harm are often embedded within platform-controlled technical systems that are inaccessible to affected individuals. This structural concentration of digital evidence generates significant procedural inequality, particularly within legal systems that rely upon limited, exception-based disclosure mechanisms. Focusing on the Coupang customer data leak as an illustrative case, this article examines how existing South Korean civil procedure struggles to address “evidentiary asymmetry” in platform-centered litigation. It argues that traditional doctrines governing burden of proof, document production, and judicial fact-finding presuppose a level of evidentiary accessibility that no longer holds in data-intensive disputes. As a result, plaintiffs are often required to prove facts that are practically unobtainable without meaningful disclosure by the defendant platform. Rather than advocating the wholesale adoption of foreign discovery regimes, this article advances a context-sensitive reconceptualization of e-discovery tailored to the Korean procedural framework. Drawing on comparative signposts from the United States and the European Union, it proposes that targeted, judicially managed mechanisms for the preservation and production of digital evidence can function as procedural equalizers, mitigating structural inequality while preserving core civil-law values. Ultimately, the article contends that recalibrating disclosure mechanisms is essential to maintaining procedural fairness and effective adjudication in the contemporary era of “platform governance” and digitally concentrated evidence.