Do Increasing Attorneys Mean Increasing Poor Attorneys?

In this paper, I will analyze the income distribution of active attorneys in Japan using the decennial income survey data from 1980 to 2010 collected by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and the mail survey of attorneys of the 62nd Legal Apprenticeship Cohort (registered in 2009) conducted in 2010 and early 2014 by myself and other legal sociologists as well as the yearly tax statistics compiled by the National Tax Agency Japan. The number of Japanese attorneys is rapidly increasing, especially since Japanese style of law school was inaugurated in 2004. Not only this time, but also whenever an agenda to increase the number of attorneys was at stake, critics argued that the larger number of attorneys would have too much competition and yield many poor attorneys, and in turn debase the quality of legal services provided. Indeed media have repeatedly reported some new attorneys are so poor. I found that the income distribution of attorneys has not changed so much as critics argued even in the latest data available, controlling for the age and gender compositions of attorneys. However, the percentage of lower middle income attorneys are slightly larger in the 2010 survey compared to previous data. Based on these analyses, I will argue that current sentiment shared by many attorneys, like “the more lawyers are, the poorer they are,” is not strongly supported by the fact but it would be a necessary sentiment of the transitional period from the age of the litigation lawyer to that of socially permeated lawyer.