Three out of four attorneys perceive that the number of new attorneys produced each year is excessively high. With falling fees and intensifying competition overlapping, concerns about a saturated legal market are spreading across the field. The Korean Bar Association said this perception was confirmed by a survey and will again take collective action, arguing that the scale of attorney admissions should be reduced.
According to the association on Apr. 3, in an online survey of 2,521 member attorneys conducted from Feb. 13 to Mar. 6, 1,914 respondents, or 75.9%, said the current number of successful candidates is excessively high. Last year, 1,744 people passed the bar exam. On the question of an appropriate scale of admissions, "1,000 or fewer per year" was the most common response at 39.5%, and 24% answered "500 or fewer." The point is that a broad perception was confirmed that the current selection scale is not at a level the market can absorb.
The on-the-ground sentiment is more direct. Of the respondents, 38.2% said the average case fee fell by 30% or more over the past five years, and 97.7% said competition among attorneys has become excessively fierce. The association believes the market is already in an oversupply phase and that saturation is accelerating as shifts in advisory demand driven by the spread of artificial intelligence, concentration of cases in government agencies, and competition with adjacent professions such as tax accountants, Certified Public Labor Attorney, and judicial scriveners overlap.
The most-needed measure cited within the association was reducing law school enrollment, followed by revising the procedure for determining bar exam passers and abolishing the vacancy補充制度. Some also argued that adjacent professions should be unified under attorneys and that the difficulty of the bar exam should be raised to drastically cut the number of passers. The underlying concern is not a simple demand to protect a professional domain, but that oversupply could ultimately lead to a decline in the quality of legal services and a survival crisis for young attorneys.
To publicly reveal this sense of crisis, the association will hold a rally at 11 a.m. on the 6th in front of the main gate of the Ministry of Justice at the Government Complex Gwacheon, calling for cuts to the number of new attorneys. Ahead of the announcement of the 15th bar exam passers, the association argues it can no longer leave in place a structure that keeps increasing the supply of legal professionals while ignoring environmental changes such as population decline and the spread of generative artificial intelligence. Citing that the number of attorneys, about 10,000 when law schools were introduced in 2009, has risen to 38,234 as of April this year, the association views a policy of expanding supply in a market where demand is shrinking or stagnant as unsustainable.
In particular, the association presents as a key rationale for cuts the fact that artificial intelligence is rapidly penetrating legal work across the board, including legal information searches, contract review, precedent analysis, and document drafting. It also notes that even compared with Japan, Korea has far more newly registered attorneys per capita, and maintains that the admissions scale should be reduced step by step to about 1,000 per year. Attorneys from local bar associations nationwide will take part in the rally, delivering the association president's declaration and participant remarks. As the debate over the scale of attorney admissions moves beyond survey results into actual collective action, pressure is expected to grow to revisit legal professional supply-and-demand policy overall.