[Adapted on 10 April for the East Asia Forum blog]
The shift since the 1990s in the self-image of many bengoshi lawyers outlined in my previous posting, underpinned also by the slowly changing nature of their work generally as well as the emergence of corporate law firms, helps explain the quite swift enactment of the 2004 Law to Promote the Use of Out-of-Court Dispute Resolution Procedures (translated here), driven also by a Judicial Reform Council (JRC) recommendation in 2001. After a slow start, the Law also seemed to be gaining some traction in promoting privately-supplied ADR services.
However, Court-annexed mediation and recent improvements in the litigation process itself leave a formidable competitor. And the conservative backlash among bengoshi in electing their new JFBA President is likely to further dampen the emergence of private ADR services and institutions. Especially now, that only seems probable if and when private suppliers develop niche markets like more facilitative (not evaluative) forms of ADR – a characteristic of ADR in Australia that has impressed ANJeL Visiting Professor Tatsuya Nakamura (see his columns in Japanese reproduced here) – and if litigation costs balloon like they have in countries like Australia.
Continue reading “Will Privately-Supplied ADR Keep Growing in Japan?”