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Court deals blow to lawyers' illegal practices

Posted April. 14, 2016 07:21,   

Updated April. 14, 2016 07:34

한국어

In a ruling against some lawyers' illegal practices, a local court has found a lawyer guilty for the first time for the practice of counterfeiting a legal document in order to evade taxes.

A higher court in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province said Tuesday that it had sentence an attorney a fine of 2 million won (1,749 U.S. dollars) for submitting a photocopied document that was used to prove the lawyer went through a local lawyers association in compliance with law when he took a copyright infringement case. The ruling overruled a lower court's acquittal of the lawyer, who had been indicted on charges of counterfeiting private documents.

The higher court said that the lawyer's act corresponded to the crime of counterfeiting a private document because he was required by law to attach an original copy of the certificate on letters of attorney.

In December 2014, the attorney took a case of a client who complained that a video of which he had copyrights was spread on the Internet. In March 2015, the lawyer wrote letters of attorney for a copyright violation suit against 30 Internet users and submitted them to the prosecution after attaching photocopied certificates of the Seoul Bar Association.

The Attorney-at-Law Act stipulates that lawyers must go through a bar association of which they are members when they submit letters of attorney to public organizations. A bar association would then issue a certificate to prove that a lawyer went through the legal procedure for taking a case. Lawyers are required to put the case and case number into a computer system of a local bar association within seven days of taking the case.

However, an increasing number of lawyers avoid going through the system in an attempt to save costs and prevent their cases from being reported to an ethics committee or a local tax office. In cases involving many plaintiffs or defendants, some lawyers attach a real certificate on just one case and use photocopied ones on the rest of the cases. The legal circles view that such a procedural violation could be used as a means to avoid paying fees to a bar association or, more seriously, to evade taxes.



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