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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Yoo Yeon-seok, Esom
Latest Nielsen rating: 8.7 per cent
Following last year’s Oh My Ghost Clients with Jung Kyung-ho, the worlds of jurisprudence and the supernatural collide once more in Phantom Lawyer, a legal comedy about a lawyer who unwillingly takes on the cases – and occasionally the personalities – of the ghost clients that drift into his practice.
Jung’s Hospital Playlist co-star Yoo Yeon-seok leads the series, while Esom (LTNS) co-stars as an ace lawyer at a larger firm who begins experiencing pangs of morality.
Yoo plays Shin Yi-rang, whom we first meet in the courtroom, dressed in black and holding a matching shaman’s fan while an aggrieved ghost that no one else can see whispers into his ear.


As Yi-rang explains, killers think they can evade justice because “the dead tell no tales”. Unfortunately for them, that is far from the truth, as it turns out that the spirits of the slain are exceptionally talkative.
The show then skips back a year to a time before Yi-rang was an assured courtroom lawyer. Back then, he was a recent law school graduate struggling to land a position at a firm.
He has the right credentials and demeanour, but rejection messages keep flooding his phone. He soon realises that he has been marked by a scarlet letter owing to the reputation of his father, a prosecutor who died awash in scandal years earlier.
Yi-rang puts on a brave face for his hard-working family, but after yet another rejection, he drinks his frustrations away and damns his luck. On the way home, he shouts in anger at the sky just as a shaman dies, unwittingly receiving the mystic’s powers.
Deciding to set up his own practice, he drunkenly stumbles into a property agent’s office, where he is told the perfect spot has recently opened up. The next day, he visits the premises and signs a lease, completely unaware that it belonged to a shaman until very recently.
Soon after setting up shop, Yi-rang’s first client arrives, only he is wearing a patient gown and floating in the air. This is Lee Gang-pung (Heo Sung-tae, Squid Game), who recently died on an operating table during what should have been a routine procedure.

After getting over the initial shock of his new-found abilities, Yi-rang reluctantly agrees to take on the malpractice case that Gang-pung’s wife has filed against the operating doctor.
Representing that doctor is the Taebaek Law Firm, where the lawyer in charge is Han Na-hyun (Esom), who was one of the interviewers who dismissed Yi-rang based on his father’s legacy.
Na-hyun boasts a flawless win record and is not about to let an upstart like Yi-rang get the better of her, even when she begins to suspect her own client may be in the wrong.
Yi-rang’s new abilities take some getting used to, especially since the foul-mouthed ex-gangster Gang-pung occasionally possesses him. This tends to happen at highly inopportune moments, such as when Yi-rang is trying to defend him in court.

Phantom Lawyer proceeds in a standard episodic fashion, with two episodes per case, a structure that usually evolves towards the end of a season as the stakes get more personal.
Na-hyun is still at Taebaek at the end of the first case, but after being saved several times by a possessed Yi-rang during a scuffle with gangsters, it probably won’t be long until she leaves the firm and joins his practice.
However, her former employer will surely remain in the picture and emerge as the climactic villain.
It is easy to make these predictions because Phantom Lawyer is very formulaic, building on a wealth of recent legal dramas and the popular subgenre of heartfelt supernatural stories where living characters help ghosts. This includes past hits like Hello Ghost and Sell Your Haunted House.
While the show doesn’t get points for originality, it certainly knows which buttons to press to entertain its audience. With its genial cast led by a gregarious Yoo, colourful staging and quick pacing, it breezes through a bouncy mix of comedy, sentiment, action, thrills and light horror.
So long as it can keep the tension alive between those disparate elements and keep its foot on the gas, it should be a smooth ride to the end of its 16-episode run.
Phantom Lawyer is streaming on Viu.


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Yoo Yeon-seok and Esom star in this new Korean drama about a lawyer who unwillingly takes on the cases of ghost clients


Yoo Yeon-seok and Esom star in this new Korean drama about a lawyer who unwillingly takes on the cases of ghost clients.


K-drama Phantom Lawyer: Yoo Yeon-seok represents deceased clients in jaunty legal comedy

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Yoo Yeon-seok and Esom star in this new Korean drama about a lawyer who unwillingly takes on the cases of ghost clients

Yoo Yeon-seok and Esom star in this new Korean drama about a lawyer who unwillingly takes on the cases of ghost clients