A Korean report says that country’s developing economy is starting to look very familiar:

It is no exaggeration to say that Korea is the “heaven of lawsuit” as the number of criminal charges and civil suits in the country is 155 times and six times higher than that of Japan, respectively.

People tend to go to court even at a slightest provocation as they institute a suit to retrieve money even if they had not signed any written contract and file for criminal charges when the case can be resolved in a civil suit.

It sounds as if the “filing” of criminal charges is a lot easier in Korea than it is here. I do civil litigation, and clients always want to know whether the fraud, or false statements under oath, or other bad acts they are positive our adversaries have done have a criminal down side. The answer, of course, is almost always “no” — prosecutors are virtually never interested in bilateral wrongdoings. That is as it should be; dragging the threat of prosecution — unspoken or otherwise — into civil litigation only makes bad situations worse (and gives your adversary a constitutional justification not to testify). Again, by all indications something very different is going on over there:

“Although over 600,000 people are being charged each year, a significant number of cases are dropped as they cannot be considered as a crime. We cannot overlook the seriousness of the current legal situation as over-issued charges are perturbing prosecutors from inspecting more crucial cases such as bribery,” said Shin Kyeong-sik, the head of planning department at the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Perhaps the Prosecutor’s Office in South Korea should be a little more Supreme.