The Brave New World of Lawyers in Japan Revisited: Proceedings of a Panel Discussion on the Japanese Legal Profession after the 2008 Financial Crisis and the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake

Abstract

In the United States, the 2008 financial crisis had a serious impact on a legal profession  that  had  been  growing  strongly  for  three  decades,  highlighting  fundamental  issues  concerning the business and educational models of both law firms and law schools. This raises the interesting question of how Japan, with its much shorter history of large law firms and professional law schools, has been affected by the 2008 financial crisis and also by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and ongoing nuclear reactor crisis.

At a recent conference sponsored by the University of Washington School of Law and  Perkins  Coie,  a  distinguished  group  of  legal  practitioners  from  the  leading  Japanese  and foreign law firms in Tokyo engaged in a panel discussion which examined the current state of Japan’s legal profession. The panelists saw both the 2008 financial crisis and the Tōhoku earthquake as one-time events that will not have significant long-term impact. Despite a lesser economic impact in Japan, however, the 2008 financial crisis raised fundamental issues similar to those in the United States concerning the appropriate models for large  law  firms  and  law schools.  The  panelists  supported  the  goals  and direction of recent Japanese reforms that overhauled the system of legal education  and  increased  the  number  of  lawyers  despite  a  number  of  current  problems,  and  explicitly embraced a new model for the legal profession: rather than the traditional small  elite with a narrow societal role, the Japanese bar would be significantly expanded and  compete to fill a wide range of law-related roles in society.