The Japanese Legal Profession in Transition (2024) (Economics, Law, and Institutions in Asia Pacific)

By: Masayuki Murayama

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Synopsis: This book focuses on the stratification of the Japanese legal profession and its impact on legal practice, drawing upon findings from two national surveys, one on Japanese lawyers (2018-19) and the other on Japanese people (2021), as well as qualitative data from interviews. Our research data clearly shows the increase of the lawyer population changed their whole world. Pressure from the lawyer population increase has not only made the stratification more visible but also diversified lawyers' career and their strategies of cultivating their legal service market. Legal practice is moving from professionalism to consumerism. Relying on retrospective data of individual lawyers' careers, this research shows how individual lawyers navigated their work and career and what have been major factors that affected their career paths. The research also shows a huge variety of lawyer's office management policies related with their market strategies. It is the first time that a national survey of lawyers was designed to obtain retrospective data of individual lawyers in Japan. This book gives a latest landscape of the Japanese legal profession in flux and the public view of changing legal practice.