[Contribution] Illegal entrustment structure that undermines trust in the judiciary. Now is the time for the state to take action.

An anonymous post that was recently posted on a lawyer community caused a great shock to the legal community as a whole. The content was that some law firms were using personnel from former investigative agencies to not only take on cases but also intervene in their processing and results, and were even offering money or valuables to correctional facility insiders or inmates to attract cases or block correspondence as a means of interfering with the business of competing lawyers. Moreover, the claim that he was caught providing funds to organized crime and being introduced to the case seemed like a simple ghost story at first.

However, in just a few days, these circumstances began to become reality through actual media reports and announcements from investigative agencies. Repeated ‘coincidences’ are no longer coincidences. We are now at a turning point where the reality of the illegal commission structure, which had been dismissed as rumors, is coming to the surface one by one.

A representative example is the so-called ‘Rolls-Royce drug hit-and-run incident’ that occurred in August 2023. The suspect who killed a woman in her 20s while driving a luxury car while under the influence of drugs was indicted on charges of providing entertainment worth 100 million won to a current police officer during the investigation of the case. According to the media, this entertainment was arranged through the office manager of a specific law firm, and the law firm was staffed with many former police officers. The suspect was also a person suspected of being linked to gang violence.

There was also an incident that followed. Two offices were searched and seized on the charge that a lawyer from another law firm transferred approximately 20 million won to a prison guard through a transaction with a detention center inmate and in return had the client assigned to a solitary confinement room rather than a general single room. The structure of buying prison conditions with money has been revealed in reality.

Cases like these suggest that illegal appointment behavior in the legal profession is a structural problem, not an isolated individual deviation. Within the legal profession, illegal brokers, so-called ‘off-site office managers’, have been operating secretly, and they have exploited the asymmetric information structure to make it impossible for the public to reasonably request cases. Brokers exaggerate investigative influence or previous titles and demand tens of millions of won from clients, and law firms have condoned or aided this. Furthermore, some are even showing duplicitous behavior by using brokers as part of their ‘sales strategy.’

The moment this illegal structure becomes a means of survival rather than an object of crackdown, trust in the judiciary collapses. Daeryun Law Firm, of which the author is the CEO, strictly prohibits all members from contacting brokers and operates an internal guideline to immediately file a complaint with an investigative agency when illegal circumstances are confirmed. However, the reality that law firms that comply with these ethical standards are marginalized in the market, and law firms that condone or utilize illegal laws have a competitive advantage is a structural reversal that seriously undermines the foundation of the rule of law.

The problem is that this can no longer be solved through self-regulation of the lawyer industry alone. Collusion with public power, leakage of investigative information, and mediation of cases are not just ethical issues, but are criminal crimes, and the damage is suffered not by specific individuals but by the entire society. Therefore, the state must now step in. In order to protect judicial justice and market trust, the government and related organizations must immediately begin a thorough investigation into cases that have already been revealed, a large-scale investigation and inspection of the overall illegal commission structure that is still continuing in the shadows, and institutional supplementation to prevent recurrence.

People trust the ethics of lawyers and entrust their rights and lives to the judicial system. However, if that trust is repeatedly betrayed, justice will collapse and the legal profession will lose its basis for existence. What we need to do now is clear. Breaking the chains of illegality and corruption and re-establishing a structure of justice that the people can trust. And it starts with the country facing this structural problem and taking practical measures.

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