Abstract
As entry barriers at the legal service market in Korea have been recently lifted, the legal service market has dramatically changed from a seller's market to a buyer's market. Externally, the Korean legal service market has been open to foreign law firms and internally, lawyers graduating from law schools have been increasing. In addition, as even the general public can easily access, through the official sites of government organizations, to the basic legal information such as laws and judicial precedents, the degree of information asymmetry has also decreased. These phenomena require the legal service industry to be a more client-oriented and more quality-oriented one. Having said that, legal service providers also need to continue to make strenuous efforts to measure and improve the service quality from the customers' perspective. Under these circumstances, this study introduced a certain type of model which may be of help of measuring and improving the quality of legal service of law firms, in particular, with a focus on those firms providing corporate legal service. This study used a Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in order to measure and thereby improve the quality of corporate legal service in the law firm industry. Above all, this study showed, by using SERVQUAL, each and every service attributes of quality measurement of the corporate legal service and also calculated the degree of importance of service quality at each process of providing corporate legal service. Next, this study introduced all supporting factors necessary for the provision of corporate legal service and calculated the degree of importance of each and every supporting factors in the service process. This study may be of help to provide the substantial and systematic approaches to the corporate legal service providers who would like to set up a certain methods of measuring and further improving the quality of corporate legal service from the customers' perspective.