Lawyers Proliferate
Published on | Source
/Yonhap
There are now over 30,000 qualified lawyers in Korea as of Wednesday, five years after their number broke the 20,000 mark.
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The Korean Bar Association pinned a badge on the 30,000th registered lawyer, Lee Jung-min from Hanyang University Law School.
Every qualified lawyer must register with the KBA before starting to practice.
The number of qualified lawyers broke the 10,000 milestone in 2006, a century after the country's first lawyer was registered in 1906.
The formerly closed profession has proliferated rapidly once an American-style law school system was launched in 2009.
"Now we're in an era of cutthroat competition among lawyers", an association spokesman said. "We need to turn the danger of a lawyer glut into an opportunity for them to work in every nook and cranny of society".