변호사 업무광고의 제한법리

Abstract

I have reviewed the current situation and proper direction of the restriction on the lawyers’ advertisement. Historically speaking, Korea has changed its position on the lawyers’ advertisement from ‘total ban’ to ‘restriction to a certain extent’. According to the Article 23 of the “Attorney-At-Law Act”, each attorney-at-law may advertise his or her educational credentials, career, main services offered, performance record and other matters necessary for publicizing his or her services through such media as newspapers, magazines, broadcasts and computer communications. However, a lawyer shall be prohibited from running any advertisement falling under any of the following subparagraphs of the article. In sum, the “Attorney-At-Law Act”, in principle, allows a lawyers’ advertisement, but has restraints on advertisements leading the legal service consumers to wrongful information or shifting too much amount of advertisement cost to the consumers. This reflects the status of a lawyer in our society, whose profession inherently has a public character. In the same line, the Article 2 of the “Attorney-At-Law Act” states that each attorney-at-law shall perform his or her duties independently and freely as a legal professional of public nature. According to the above articles of the “Attorney-At-Law Act”, the Korean Bar Association has enacted the ‘Rules on Advertisement of Attorney-at-Law Practice’, and ‘Standards for Advertisement of Attorney-at-Law Practice using Internet and the like’. I have noticed two special features from the disciplinary cases of the lawyers’ advertisement publicized by the the Korean Bar Association recently. One is the rapid increase of the number of disciplinary advertisement cases during the four years from 2015 to the end of 2018. The other is almost ninety percent of the cases were related to the advertisements through internet and the like. I think the principles of the law and regulations to allow but restrict lawyers’ advertisement to a certain degree is inevitable, given the public status of a lawyer and asymmetrical information between the lawyers and consumers. In an effort to seek proper development of future restrictions of the lawyers’ advertisement, I have reviewed three points. The first one is to seek more proper and specific standards for the registration of a lawyer’s specialty area of the Korean Bar Association. The second is to further develop more concrete legal ethics of lawyers’ advertisement in cyberspace. And the last but not the least, is to further develop and adjust proper roles of the Korean Bar Association and related District Bar Associations with regards to supplying proper information for the legal service consumers without any special advertising methods, and also keeping proper and equitable restraints level on the member lawyers’ advertisements in the future.