A divorce client needed Korean securities records to prove that a spouse was a shareholder of a family-owned Korean corporation. In the course of a comprehensive asset search, we obtained those records and were able to calculate the value of the shares held.

Our bill was $2,700.

This case turned on whether a woman was a shareholder in a family corporation. We did not have a Korean-language version of her name, and the records were in Korean only. We were able to establish a high probability that she was the person identified in the roll of insider shareholders. The initial problem was that she was marked “male” and not “female” by the record retriever who translated the documents for us.

Fortunately, we know that many official Korean records are rendered in traditional Chinese characters and not the more modern Hangul alphabet. In-house we were able to tell that the character next to the subject’s name said “woman” and not “man.” The retriever confirmed that he had been in error, and we were able to report the result to the client.