The Americanization of East Asian Legal Education

Since the 1950s, Japan’s bar association has operated a very simple procedure for becoming a lawyer: pass the bar exam. That’s it. No law schools. No pre-exam training. Applicants did not even have to graduate from a university.

While that might sound liberal, the results were not egalitarian. The pass rate has typically varied between 1% to 3% a year, and half of all attorneys are from Japan’s top five universities. More than 90% have undergraduate degrees in law, the average attorney passes the exam on the fifth try, and the average age of admittance to the bar bar is 28. That means many, many hopeful attorneys wasted years of their lives studying hard for the exam, many of whom had to give up in their 30s (or even 40s), having lost much of their young professional lives.

Yet this system is on the way out. Japan took a major step towards revolutionizing its legal sector in 2004 when it opened American-style law schools. The standard course is three years, or two years for students with undergraduate degrees in law. The first “new bar exam” was held this past May, and the results will be issued in the fall with an expected pass rate of 55%. (For comparison purposes, that’s higher than California.) Non-law school hopefuls can still take the “old bar exam” until it is phased out in 2011.

Most of you are probably thinking, “so what?” But this is a major step in changing how lawyers are admitted to the bar in Japan. In the meantime, we should see a slow expansion of the number of lawyers in Japan. This is good news for Japan’s business world as well—the lack of competent business attorneys has meant a massive influx of foreign attorneys, who have maneuvered into a position where they come close to dominating the major transactions in the Tokyo legal world.

Japan is not alone. Believe it or not, South Korea is following in Japan’s steps. Although plans to open these law schools in 2008 have been delayed, reports suggest that Korea is ready to open American-style law schools in 2009, which mean that Korea, which has a remarkably similar legal sector to Japan (can you guess why?), will be following Japan in following the American model. What does this mean for East Asia? Big change—and a more transparent legal system that will look a lot like the United States.

SIDENOTE: I’m away for the next few days, posting to resume on Friday.