Supreme Court Orders Lawyer to Pay Additional Damages in School Violence Case

The Supreme Court has ruled that lawyer Kwon Kyung-ae must pay an additional 90 million won in contractual damages to the family of a school violence victim. This ruling stems from Kwon's repeated failure to attend court hearings while representing the family, which resulted in the case being dismissed.

Previously, a lower court had ordered Kwon and her law firm to pay 65 million won in damages for emotional distress. However, the Supreme Court's decision mandates an additional payment of 90 million won based on a written agreement Kwon made with the family. This agreement stipulated that Kwon would pay a total of 90 million won over three years as compensation for the damages caused by her negligence.

Kwon had been representing the mother of a deceased victim of school violence. After initially winning a partial victory in the first trial, Kwon failed to appear for three consecutive appellate court hearings. This led to the case being dismissed under civil procedure law. Furthermore, Kwon allegedly withheld this information from the family for nearly five months, by which time the deadline for an appeal had passed.

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There were no conditions for the payment of the contractual money stipulated in this performance agreement, nor were there any related clauses that could be interpreted as questioning the existence of payment conditions.

The lower court had initially rejected the claim for the 90 million won contractual payment. The court reasoned that although the agreement did not explicitly state it, the payment was conditional on the case not being reported by the media. Kwon had argued that since the family later publicized the case, she was no longer obligated to pay. The lower court accepted this argument, considering the circumstances under which the agreement was made.

However, the Supreme Court overturned this reasoning. The highest court stated that the written agreement contained no explicit conditions for the payment. It found it difficult to accept Kwon's claim that a condition regarding media coverage was agreed upon but omitted from the document, especially given her professional understanding of legal documents. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the Seoul Central District Court for further proceedings regarding the contractual payment.

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Given that the defendant (Kwon Kyung-ae) was likely well aware of the meaning and content of the disposition document as a lawyer, it is difficult to readily accept the claim that the parties agreed to make the payment conditional and failed to include it in the agreement.