The Japanese just can't get enough of their lawyers

The Japanese government, drowning in a flood of bankruptcies and legal actions, is attempting to triple the country's supply of lawyers by 2003.

The Japanese government, drowning in a flood of bankruptcies and legal actions, is attempting to triple the country's supply of lawyers by 2003.

A massive recruitment drive this year is likely to include a TV advertising campaign and rallies on university campuses.

Government sources believe that unless they address the shortage now, it will rapidly become unmanageable. In 2001, the Japanese economy suffered one of its worst years on record. Markets slumped and industrial production crashed to a 14-year low. Figures released at the end of December showed unemployment at a post-war high of 5.5 per cent. At the root of all of this has been the seemingly unstoppable tide of corporate failures and bankruptcies – almost 18,000 Japanese companies went bust last year. This has created a huge volume of insolvency cases and legal actions brought by individuals and unions. It is far too great a burden for Japan's 18,000 lawyers to manage, and their numbers must be bolstered.

Kazuo Sugeno, professor of law at Tokyo University, and one of the architects of the new programme said: "The shortage of lawyers is one of Japan's most pressing problems. There just are not enough specialists to handle the problem, and urgent cases are taking years to resolve. Over the past two decades, law graduates from this department and other universities have either gone into banking or followed the traditional path into bureaucracy or politics, no matter what we tell them. Perhaps now that the job market is so bad, even being a lawyer will seem attractive."

The government is keen to train up Japanese graduates as corporate lawyers, and to encourage struggling companies to consider defensive mergers as a last resort before bankruptcy. With this in mind, it is planning to establish a Western-style law conversion course.

In the UK and US, graduates from all disciplines are able to take a two-year trainee course. The Japanese lawyer drought is so bad that the government is planning to make the conversion course last just one year before students can join a firm of solicitors.