Kim & Chang

Litigation; International Arbitration & Cross-Border Litigation; Corporate Investigations & White Collar Defense; Product Liability & Consumer Claims

Sang Ho Han is the chair of the Litigation Practice at Kim & Chang. He handles both domestic and international litigation and has extensive experience in alternative dispute resolution, including arbitration and mediation.

Mr. Han is an accomplished litigator and a trial attorney. He has successfully defended multinational corporations and Fortune 500 companies in a wide variety of cases, including product liability, professional liability, antitrust & competition, tax & administrative litigation, corporate governance, employment and white collar crime. His domestic and foreign clients range from manufacturing companies and financial institutions to IT and high-technology companies.

Before joining Kim & Chang in 1998, Mr. Han was a judge for 20 years in various courts of Korea, experiencing civil, criminal and administrative cases. He was a Senior Judge in the Seoul District Court and a Presiding Judge of a civil panel. He last served on the bench as a Chief Judge of Uijeongbu Branch Court of Seoul District Court. He was also a professor at the Judicial Research & Training Institute of the Supreme Court, where he lectured on a wide range of subjects, including practice in civil litigation. He used to be the co-chairman of the Academy of Private Case Law Studies, an organization comprising distinguished judges and legal scholars, and he served as an editor of the journal, Private Case Law Studies.

Mr. Han has authored many official publications including case reports, a collection of learned papers and a judicial yearbook as Chief Librarian of the Court Library of the Supreme Court of Korea. He has also published numerous articles on issues relating to various disputes and product liability, including Commentaries on Civil Code (co-author, 1992), New Trends in Domain Name Related Disputes and Study in Dispute Resolution (2002) and the Korea section of The International Comparative Legal Guide to Product Liability (2006). He is a frequent guest speaker at international professional legal conferences in Korea and abroad and at various academic conferences in Korea.

Since joining Kim & Chang, he served as a member of the Judicial Advisory Committee in the Ministry of Justice (1999-2000) where he was actively involved in the amendments to Korea’s Civil Procedure Act. He served as an executive director of Planning for the Korean Bar Association (2004-2006), as a policy advisor to the Supreme Public Prosecutors Office (2005-2007) and as a member and a chairman for the Committee for Administrative Consultation and Coordination (2012-2016). Mr. Han is also an experienced arbitrator on the Korean Commercial Arbitration Board, having arbitrated numerous high-profile disputes.

Korean, English and Japanese

Admitted to bar, Korea, 1976

Cambridge University (Diploma in Legal Studies, 1985) Graduate School of Law, Seoul National University (LL.M., 1981) Judicial Research and Training Institute of the Supreme Court of Korea (1976) Seoul National University (LL.B., 1972)