Introducing a source-linked inventory of 21 South Korean law firms and 7,884 professional profiles, and the next steps toward a legal-career database.
1. Building on our research on organizations and careers
We are introducing a preliminary analysis of South Korean law firms and legal professionals, beginning with a source-linked inventory of firms and their public professional profiles. This work develops the lab's South Korea Law database and our Networks & Organizations approach: studying how people, positions, and organizations connect.
The project complements our South Korea Politics and Taiwan Politics databases, which organize evidence about officials, appointments, and political careers. Extending that perspective to the legal profession creates a basis for future research on professional careers and movement between public institutions and private practice. This first release establishes the firms and source profiles; it does not yet establish career histories or links between individuals across these databases.
2. South Korean law firms
The firm inventory covers 21 distinct firms, combining the firms in Asian Legal Business's 2025 South Korea top ten and Hankyung's 2025 overall top twenty. It begins with Kim & Chang, Bae, Kim & Lee, Shin & Kim, Lee & Ko, and Yulchon, and expands to the wider set represented in those lists.
The index brings together English and Korean names, official websites, ranking memberships, selected dated firm information, and source notes. Its rankings answer different questions: ALB measures size by lawyer headcount, while Hankyung reports survey rankings. The five-firm Asia Business Law Journal Best Overall award selection is retained separately. These measures should be read alongside their definitions, rather than combined into a single league table.
Explore the South Korean law-firm index.
3. South Korean legal professionals
Our first profile inventory, collected on 16 September 2026, contains 7,884 distinct firm-local profiles and 7,884 profile URLs across 19 firms. All 21 firms were searched. The searchable directory links to the firms' own profiles and presents counts and collection notes for each firm.
These are published profile records, not a count of unique lawyers or verified current employees. The collection includes advisers, patent professionals, and other listed legal specialists; some directories cover overseas offices. Profiles are deduplicated within each firm, but identities have not been reconciled across firms. ClassHankyul and HMP Law could not be collected because of access barriers, and some practice-based directories may omit professionals. A zero obtained count therefore does not mean a firm has no professionals.
The next stage is to extract structured education, qualifications, employment, and public-service histories from retained source evidence, then review those records before integrating them into a career database. This release provides the initial map of sources and its coverage limits, rather than completed findings about career pathways.
Search the legal-professional profiles. The SQLite snapshot, data guide, and coverage notes are also available for examining the preliminary data.
4. Five views of South Korea’s legal profession
Five editorial graphics explore ways to introduce the firms at the starting point of this project: Kim & Chang, Bae, Kim & Lee, Shin & Kim, Lee & Ko, and Yulchon. Each uses the same five firms; the arrangement does not represent a ranking or a measured relationship.
1. Editorial index
2. Firm constellation
3. Research collage
4. Seoul panels
5. Typographic mosaic
AI-generated editorial illustrations, using the firms’ official websites as visual references. Logo treatments are illustrative reproductions. Cityscapes are not depictions of the firms’ offices.