Eric Sedlak is a Partner at the Tokyo office of Jones Day, working in the areas of M&A, infrastructure and real estate finance, cross-border investment and restructuring. An active member of the ACCJ, who has served for many years as co-chair of the Legal Services Committee, he talks about his time in Japan and Asia, and offers some insights for those unfamiliar with Japan’s legal world.
In the 21 years since Eric Sedlak first came to Japan from the West Coast, where he had previously been working with Japanese corporate clients, he has seen many changes, both in his professional business environment and in the ways in which Japanese society has evolved over this time.
Foreign lawyers in Japan are not as rare a breed as might appear from outside the country. The term Gaikokuho Jimu Bengoshi (Sedlak, along with other lawyers practicing here, abbreviates this to “gaiben”) is a product of the Foreign Lawyers Law, permitting non-Japanese lawyers to provide legal services within Japan on matters pertaining to the overseas legal systems for which they are licensed. The 300 to 400 gaiben currently practicing are, explains Sedlak, chiefly spread among 40 and 50 foreign law firms, with a number at Japanese bengoshi firms and some solo practitioners, most recently from China and Latin America.
While it was previously the case that a foreign law firm needed a minimum of one gaiben, for the past six years or so Nichibenren (the Japan Federation of Bar Associations) has strongly recommended that all partners be registered, and more recently (Sedlak explains that this recommendation, like many Japanese regulations, may be interpreted as “mandatory”) that all foreign lawyers providing unsupervised legal services should be so registered. In order to expand the scope of their practices, Japanese law firms also employ gaiben and Sedlak sees the total number of such lawyers in Japan rising, maybe up to 800 or higher within a few years.
Though the basic requirements for registration are relatively simple (three years’ practice, including two years outside Japan), Sedlak compares the cumbersome Japanese process of certification, which may take up to a year, and many pieces of paper, against the equivalent in Singapore-two weeks.
However frustrating Japanese bureaucracy may be at times, Sedlak emphasizes Japan’s opening up in other areas. The bursting of the real estate-fueled bubble in the early 1990s sapped some Japanese confidence, and has made Japanese companies more willing to consider investment, or sale of a division or technology, if not outright sale of the whole enterprise, and the tightly-knit network of cross-shareholdings has far less influence than before.
Pages: 1 2
