Abstract
Even after Judicial Reform in Japan which has the policy of increasing numbers of lawyers including
in-house counsel, the number of in-house counsel fall short of their expectation. The mission of this article is to give a prospect whether the number of in-house counsel in Japan will increase or not after now. To response this request, a series of questionnaire surveys on corporate legal practices in Japanese corporations which have been conducted every 5 years from 1965 was analyzed. Findings from them are as follows. Firstly, in these surveys, interests to in-house counsel have been increased consistently from mid of 1970’ to now. The questions about in-house counsel are increasing and tend to treat more details of it. Secondly, though the system to produce corporate legal staffs in Japanese corporations has depended on corporate members who are not qualified as the human resource, some fundamentals of it have been transforming nowadays. The result of recent surveys show, (1) Human resource management in Japanese corporations have been changed to seek to adopt quickly to their business, (2) The request to legal staffs has been upgrading on legal knowledge for their business, and then (3) Legal profession as a new member is expected with upgraded legal knowledge for response to their circumstances. It takes over 40 years the development of corporate legal departments in Japan, so it maybe proper to say that we should take more time to observe this trend.
