법률비용보험의 국내시장 활성화 방안에 관한 연구
A Study on Revitalization of LEI in the Domestic Market
이봉림
초록
The current Legal Expense Insurances(LEIs) of the world can be categorized into two types. One is the insurance of the commerce type which insurance companies make as one of the insurance product. This regards the situation which a legal service is required as an insurance accident and pays the fee of the legal service provided as a insurance payment. The other is the mutual aid type which makes funds for a prospective legal service and, with the funds, provides a legal service directly or pays the fee of it. Korea is in urgent need of the introduction of LEI since the legal service market has been distorted mainly due to the lawyers' improper prestige, highly expensive lawyers' fee and the lack of understanding of legal dispute resolution process. In these reasons, several internet legal companies entered the stage of market recently. As these companies considered the legal counselling and LEI as profitable items, they developed LEI products co-working with domestic property insurance companies. In spite of close examination to introduce LEI, a number of facts prevented it to be successful. First, different from the other insurances, LEI guarantees expenses of highly specialized services. Second, the lawyers' fee is unreasonably high. Third, the character of 'the problem of the adverse selection' is quite different from that of the other insurances. Finally, it is difficult to calculate the scale of legal service market with existing statistic records. Recently, Financial Supervisory Service announced that domestic cyber-law firm will launch a new insurance item sooner or later. In this paper, I checked the present condition of the domestic legal market, all circumstances for and the effects of successful importation, and made a remark about some points to be improved. Considering that the number of legal disputes including nonlitigation cases is almost 16 millions, market for LEI is fully matured and LEI will be the primary item of the insurance against loss without doubt. In addition, LEI should take root because it has public benefits to help the realization of social justice.