How we rank — what the order is built from

Choosing candidates

For each city we take listings categorised as law offices on Naver Map. Names containing other professions — labour consultants, certified labour attorneys, judicial scriveners, administrative agents, patent attorneys, tax accountants, loss adjusters — are removed. Firm corporations and sole practitioners are both kept.

No office is added or removed by hand. Candidates follow from the conditions above, and changing a condition recomputes the whole country at once.

Cities with fewer than six candidates get no ranking. Ordering two or three offices is not a comparison.

What sets the order

Five things are weighed together: registration with the Ministry of Justice and a confirmed bar association; the number of offices the same corporation keeps in that city; visitor review volume; consultation hours, including round-the-clock, weekday evenings and weekends; and whether a website or booking link is listed.

The first two, which are publicly verifiable, outweigh review volume. If review counts dominated, the offices that advertise most would rise, and that is not the comparison this site is for.

How the parts are combined, and the weight of each, is not published. Pages show the rank number and the facts behind it, not a total score.

Ties are broken by registration, then office count, then visitor reviews, then rating.

Why ratings do not set the order

Ratings are copied as shown on Naver Map. We do not compute them and do not order the list by them.

Barely a third of the offices in the country have a rating on record. Scoring the rest as zero would measure whether a rating exists rather than what people thought. So the value is shown and left out of the order.

For the same reason the rating is not emitted as an aggregate rating in our structured data. We do not restate someone else’s tally as our own claim.

There are no figures of our own

Not one number on this site comes from a survey or measurement we ran. Every figure is either taken from the two public sources below or counted and divided from them.

The Ministry of Justice register of law firm corporations is published as a file on the national open data portal. It is not an API — a file is posted monthly and we download it. The terms are KOGL Type 1, attribution. It carries the corporation name, address and bar association, and does not carry founding dates, headcounts or phone numbers.

Naver Map supplies the office list, address, coordinates, phone, consultation hours, registered keywords and menus, visitor review counts, ratings and photos. All of these are values each office registered itself.

The Korean Bar Association member search is not used. That site expressly forbids using its information for purposes other than retaining counsel.

How practice areas are counted

Areas are read from the keywords and menus each office registered on the map service. Matches found only in the office name are excluded from the distribution — names are often promotional and inflate the count.

One office can list several areas, so the column adds up to more than the number of offices. And this is what an office claims, not the share of cases it actually takes.

We do not use the word “specialist”. Under Korean advertising rules for attorneys, only those who have registered a specialty with the Korean Bar Association may use it. We have no source confirming that registration, so we write only “areas listed”.

What this site does not do

It does not connect you to a consultation. It does not book, broker or refer, and it does not pass cases along. Consultations are arranged directly with each office.

Nothing is charged for inclusion or position. There are no affiliate links or ads, and the people who build this site hold no stake, employment or partnership with any listed office.

Consultation fees are not shown, and are not collected in the first place.

The order is a sort of public records by fixed criteria. It is not a ranking of ability or of how likely a case is to succeed.

Correcting something

If something here is wrong, tell us which page and which office and we will check and fix it. Where the public source itself changed, the fix lands at the next refresh.

The raw records are kept as received, so any sentence can be traced back to the value and the moment it came from.