Posted on 08/21/2006 1:55:46 PM PDT by george76
In sweeping legal reform, increasingly litigious Japan expecting flood of new lawyers...
In past years, 25-year-old law school graduate Hiroyuki Ichikawa would have been facing an almost impossible task : a bar exam with a 97 percent failure rate. Now, his chances are closer to 50-50.
In the most sweeping reform of Japan's legal system since World War II, the doors are opening wide for a flood of new lawyers, prosecutors and judges to handle criminal and civil cases in an increasingly litigious society.
Experts say the reforms are long overdue and underscore a big shift in social attitudes that is forcing Japan to change its longstanding policy of keeping the number of lawyers low and the public out of the courts.
Hideaki Kubori, a corporate lawyer and a professor at Omiya Law School outside Tokyo. "There are just not enough lawyers."
Japan has roughly 22,000 lawyers _ one for every 5,790 people, compared with one for every 268 in the U.S.
Under the old bar exam, to be scrapped in 2011, fewer than 1,500 people are allowed to pass every year.
In the United States, with about twice Japan's population, the number is closer to 75,000.
Freshly graduated Ichikawa knows the odds will remain stacked against the defenders, and therefore wants to specialize in corporate law for now.
"I think it is impossible to make a living by becoming a criminal lawyer," he said. "There are so few incentives to become one."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Next China should encourage more dumb lawsuits on themselves.
LOL
Well the dollar is still a bit weak against the Yen -- but do you have enough TIME to translate all the lawyer jokes or just the top 10,000 or so? ; )
Forget Godzilla: the REAL monsters are about to invade Tokyo. . .
Let me back up what Gaijin said. I lived in Japan for quite a while and understand that their legal system is still in it's infancy.
It is almost impossible in any way to sue a medical establishment for malpractice (even though passing the general medical exam allows you to freely put any specialization next to your name -except anestheseoligist). If you die, your relatives may be able to receive compensation after 5-6 years of litigation work.
I know that Citibank was shut down in Japan because of a very small infraction, in order to bolster the Japanese banking market. If fact, unless you had less than $3,000 in your account, you had to pay sales tax and a $30 monthly fee in order to be able to use Citibank (Gov't interference).
And I am not EVEN going to mention labor infractions toward foreigners. Those get very little attention unless they are continually pounded on by unions.
>>>> Even if it makes me sound like a friggin LEFTY, LOTS of good Japanese people have confessed to all sorts of crap they didn't do, just cuz they couldn't get a lawyer, or weren't afforded access to one.
Japan has exactly the OPPOSITE problem from the USA.
In many cases, if you're a foreign corporation, you just can't get legal representation of any kind. Or...you're confined to a kind of proto legal advisor.
THIS IS LONG OVERDUE.
Might be a money making idea! :-)
(Ahem, that will be 1,200 yen, please)....
Nothing it seems can be worked out 'hanashiai' these days.
Just watch peoples' panicking defensiveness emerging from their car at even a slight fender bender (small scratch) that was their fault----or the nonsense rattled off for 1 minute in the middle of a cough syrup commercial.
You can get sued at the drop of a frikkin hat in the USA...it has a lot of people on pins and needles, especially employers (managers) and medical professionals.
Walt Disney's fault.
Free trade: we'll send Japan three lawyers for every engineer they send us.
Might as well - it puts our economies on an equal footing.
the funny thing is that there are nearly twice as many lawyers in CA as there are in TX. And their pass rate is much lower. IOW, some places are more saturated than others.
Only 3 lawyers for 1 engineer? You're cheating the poor Japanese.Send them a baker's dozen per productive worker!
There are only two lawyer jokes. The rest are all true stories.
People like to bash lawyers.
Until they need them.
Most don't practice law, but are in business.
Two of my mangers --- VP Risk and financial are technically lawyers. Basically know enough law to talk to outside counsel.
I think the "actually practice" number is like 1 to 1,000.
And to think people are actually worrying about an epidemic of bird flu.
Citibank has a long and welcome history in Japan. However, recently Citibank has run a sloppy business in Japan which should be the subject of regulatory measures.
For instance, here are the reasons for the latest corrective measures taken by the FSA to make Citibank run a better business:
II. Reasons for Administrative Actions
- There was a failure in the transaction processing system of the Consumer Bank Division: when the payment and receipt transactions for May 3 through May 8 should have been processed at the time of automatic batch processing performed at night after business hours on Monday, May 8, 2006, the payment and receipt transactions for May 2 were processed redundantly by failure, and customers' transactions for May 3 through May 8 were unrecorded or undisplayed. This caused confusion and problems in customer account transactions, settlement, etc. The system failure affected approximately 97,000 customers (approximately 100,000 accounts) of the Branches, having such as yen or US-dollar ordinary savings accounts.
- There was another system failure in the Corporate Bank Division on Friday, June 23, 2006: due to the improper execution of nighttime batch processing of the system that governs the operation of the global cash management service which allows customers to manage their cash balances at real-time and other services, some transactions involving payment, receipt, etc. dated June 22 were either displayed twice or not displayed at all. The system failure affected approximately 1,900 transactions out of approximately 2,200 transactions dated June 22 (approximately 200 companies).
- Both of the aforementioned system failures occurred at the system development department and the data processing center of Citigroup in Singapore to which the Branches outsourced. As the system development department had been performing development work, etc. inconsistently with the actual operation environment and requirements when developing and transferring the customer account transactions processing system of the Consumer Bank Division, faults in the basic programs caused system malfunctions and the aforementioned system failures.
At the data processing center, when the system (hard disk) of the Corporate Bank Division broke down, the failure was caused by a rudimentary mistake during the recovery work: wrong steps were taken in the basic backup process.- In February 2004, the data processing center caused an accident involving the massive loss of customer information of the Branches. As problems were identified in the Branches' system to oversee and control customer information management and the outsourcee, the Branches received a business improvement order under the Banking Law. The series of system failures which occurred recently revealed that, although the development and operation of the Branches' mission-critical operation system are being outsourced overseas on a large scale, no appropriate oversight and control system commensurate with it has been developed at the Branches (in terms of adequate staffing and the construction of a proper organization and structure).
- On the other hand, the Branches are currently deemed to have operational problems in terms of its inability to judge and respond to the situations in a timely and appropriate manner by fully taking into consideration the impact of system failures on customers and the increase of customer risks after the system failures. In addition, the Branches failed to properly develop a framework and control procedures to respond promptly in the event of system failures.
In particular, no framework of authority or segregation of responsibilities has been developed for an executive officer who oversees the internal control of the Branches to instruct and oversee the sales and operation divisions in a timely and appropriate manner.- Moreover, the management committee--the top decision-making body in the Branches--does not comprehensively examine or discuss important management decisions, such as the decision to develop and transfer mission-critical systems, etc. and policies on how to respond to the situation, how to deal with customers, etc. in the event of system failures. It is deemed to have organizational and operational problems which prevent it from fulfilling its oversight and checking functions with respect to sales and operation divisions.
- As described above, system malfunctions and failures are being caused by organizational and operational problems in the Branches' control system for system management, given the Branches and outsourcee's response to the series of system failures and management's revel of involvement, it is difficult to assume that voluntary actions of the Branches alone would bring in necessary improvements.
I have personal experience working for a regulated foreign financial entity in Japan and my personal experience was that the regulators are exceedingly thorough, and infractions of bank regulations are not tolerated. I think that they do an excellent job.
I also have worked with Japanese legal staff and I think that the current system produces top-notch lawyers, and I don't want to see the Japanese system flooded with the problems that we have here of too many hack lawyers and too much frivolous litigiousness.
Very interesting take. The only thing that made me sympathetic to Citibank's case is that they were the only foreign bank in Japan, and the only way I could deposit and receive money overseas. However, I had heard of the shutdown in 2004, 2 years before these actions happened. But still very interesting and extremely revealing.
I would just like to add that I really dont think that Japanese banks are held to the same standards as Citibank, because Sumitomo et al have had numerous shutdowns and errors as well, and are treated on a different level.
What, by the way, was the reason that Citibank customers were taxed and fined for an account lower than $3000? I never got that either. There is no such penalty in Japanese banking.
Again, thank you for the input.
The Keidanren (Business Federation) has been pushing this for years. There is a trickle of foreign lawyers, plus Japanese who have been picking up a legal education in the US and coming back to get licensed as foreign lawyers.
It is still not clear when the dam will break though - the introduction of a law school system doesn't accomplish much, since graduates still have to gain admittance to the Supreme Court's Legal Training Institute in order to get a license to practice. I suspect they will end up with a barrister/solicitor-type system that distinguishes between the true elite who went straight to the LTI and the rest of the hoi polloi.
TT
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