About
Hyeon Song Lee
Ms. Lee is a lawyer qualified in both the Republic of Korea, and England and Wales, practising in Korean regulatory matters, public sector advisory work, and cross-border transactions and disputes.
The shape of her practice comes from having worked on several sides of the same set of problems. six years in Korean Ministries gave a working view of how policy and regulation are actually made — the constraints, the internal logic, the questions that get asked before a rule is issued. Private practice added the litigation and transactional discipline. Finally, time in-house counsel made clear how differently those rules read from inside a business under commercial pressure.
E. hyeon.lee@thepinelaw.com T. +82 2 6953 0455
Language: Korean, English
Founding Attorney
Admission and Qualification
Solicitor, England and Wales (2017)
Attorney-at-Law, Republic of Korea (2012)
University College London LL.M, Law (2016)
Yonsei University LL.B., Law (2010)
Career
Pine Law Office, Founding Attorney (2023-)
Ministry of Justice of Korea, ISDS Defence team (2020-2022)
Lee & Ko, International trade and arbitration team (2018-2020)
LG Electronics, Inc, Legal team (2014-2016)
Ministry of Industry and Trade of Korea (2012-2014)
Judicial Research & Training Institute (2010-2012)
How I Work
01
Your matter is handled by me throughout
This is a single-lawyer practice by choice. The person who takes your first call is the person who drafts the submission and appears at the hearing. The corollary is that capacity is finite, so I decline matters I cannot take on properly, and I say so quickly rather than holding a file.
02
Scope and fees are agreed before work begins
You receive a written scope, a fee basis, and an estimate at the outset. Where a matter is genuinely unpredictable — a regulatory investigation, for instance — you get the range and what moves it, not a figure I will revise later. Changes in scope are raised before the work is done, not on the invoice.
03
Advice is written to be acted on
Foreign clients are often handed Korean law translated into English and left to work out what it means for them. That is not advice. My advice states what the authority is likely to do, what your realistic options are, and which one I would choose, in the legal vocabulary your own counsel already uses.
04
The weak points come first
If your position is poor, you hear that in the first conversation. If a dispute should be settled rather than litigated, or a filing withdrawn rather than defended, that is the recommendation — including where it means a smaller engagement. Clients who need a second opinion later are better served by getting the first one straight.