로펌의 성장과 변호사윤리의 변화: 개인윤리에서 조직윤리로, 공익활동에서 사회적 책임으로

Abstract

In Korea, as the number of lawyers has increased and their influence has grown, professional ethics of lawyers has turned into an important social issue. This concern has been mainly dedicated to the responsibility of individual lawyers; in particular to their unacceptable behavior such as the privileges of lawyers’ former posts as judges or prosecutors and overcharged attorney fees. In contrast, relatively little concern was paid to responsibility of law firms themselves rather than individual practitioners. However, law firms as legal subjects have much influence on many social affairs so that their responsibility can be effectively addressed only if they are seen as aggregated legal subjects themselves. In this respect, this paper attempts to address ethics that should be applied to law firms. First of all, it deals with the history of lawyer’s ethics in the US and Korea in relation to the growth of law firms. This leads to the change of lawyer’s ethics from individual ethics to organizational ethics and from pro bono activities to social responsibility. As a tentative conclusion, the last section is dedicated to corporate social responsibility for law firms in that this contributes to clarifying what should be required for law firms’ ethics.