The Internship

More of an immersion really, shadowing Ito-Sensei and Umeda-Sensei as they go about their work. We had a good conversation going about lawyer advertising (not prohibited, but highly regulated in Japan) and law firm websites (unacknowledged by both bench and bar in the Philippines, which means it ends up being advertising via the backdoor). It's a change of pace from the practice I have back home. My translator (and "legal guardian") Yoshiko was awesome, I was extremely lucky that she was my guide through all this. 

The time was too short for any meaningful comparative law, so I tended to focus on fundamentals like the way they allocate spaces (the conference room, not lawyer's offices, is the hub of activity and is usually the biggest area of any law office), as well as record keeping and filing (I'm translating some case management forms, hopefully to be used in the office).