About Ja Young Jeon
I am a foreign attorney at Kim & Chang, Korea’s leading law firm, where my practice sits at the intersection of global fund sponsors and Korean regulators and institutions.
I trained at Yale Law School and am qualified in California, and I practice in both English and Korean. Most of my work is for people who do not sit in Korea: in-house counsel and fundraising teams at global sponsors, US and European fund formation lawyers who route Korea questions to local counsel, and foreign GPs and LPs looking at Korean funds. My job is to translate between the way the Financial Supervisory Service actually operates and the way global fund lawyers actually work.
What I work on
My practice covers the full lifecycle of Korea-related fund work:
- Registration of offshore funds for placement with Korean institutional investors — from pre-marketing questions through registration and the obligations that follow.
- Cross-border investment advisory and discretionary investment management (CB IA/DIM) licensing for offshore managers servicing Korean institutions — applications, ongoing obligations, reorganizations, and exits.
- Foreign investment into Korean funds — institutional-only PEFs under the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act, and Korean venture fund regimes.
- Ongoing Korean fund regulatory advisory — marketing compliance, FSS inquiries and thematic reviews, investor eligibility, and investor-facing issues after the money is in.
Representative matter types include offshore fund registrations for global private equity, private credit, real estate, hedge and venture sponsors; cross-border licensing applications and deregistrations; LP-side reviews of commitments to Korean vehicles; and responses to regulator inquiries directed at offshore managers.
How I work
I deal with the FSS regularly, and I am familiar with how the major Korean institutional investors document their commitments. That combination matters in practice: most Korea questions from foreign sponsors are less about what a statute says than about how the regulator and the institutions actually behave — what they ask for, in what order, and which facts move the answer.
The posts on this site follow the same philosophy. They frame the situations and name the questions global managers actually bring; the answers turn on specific facts, and those conversations happen directly.
Contact
- Email: jayoung.jeon@kimchang.com
- Firm profile: Kim & Chang — Ja Young Jeon
The views expressed on this website are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Kim & Chang. See the full disclaimer.