This article first appeared on October 24, 2017 in ALB Insights, a weekly, ad-free newsletter that is sent to subscribers. To purchase your subscription, please email Amantha at amantha.chia@thomsonreuters.com or call her at +65 6870 3917.
A group of lawyers from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s Japan office recently spun off to form a boutique firm called Vanguard Lawyers Tokyo. John Kang talks to founding partner Akiko Yamakawa about why they left the Magic Circle firm and their plans for the newly created employment and disputes boutique.
What was the motivation behind launching Vanguard Lawyers Tokyo?
In the Tokyo market, the global law firms are increasingly focusing on outbound work, and the major Japanese law firms, given their size, provide a wide range of services to various clients and are also actively opening offices outside Japan. We saw a need in the Tokyo legal market for a boutique law firm that focuses predominantly on providing high quality specialized Japanese employment law and domestic disputes advice to multinational companies with operations in Japan.
What are the advantages to operating as an independent boutique firm?
All of our partners joined Freshfields Tokyo between 1998 and 2000, and very much enjoyed our days at the firm. When we joined Freshfields, the office focused on inbound work. Over time and in response to the changing market in Japan, as well as the demands of Freshfields’ clients, the office has focused increasingly on outbound work, in particular transactional work, international arbitration and investigations. It has also developed a very strong antitrust and competition practice, with Kaori Yamada having been made partner this year.
However, our group and Freshfields agreed that there was no longer a clear synergy between our practice and the other practices of the Tokyo office, so we agreed that it would be best to spin off our practice to a boutique law firm. The advantages of operating as an independent boutique firm is that we have more flexibility in determining matters such as the strategy of our practice, our client base and pricing. We also face less issues when clearing conflicts.
Our relationship with Freshfields remains very good and, as part of their StrongerTogether network, we will still work together whenever it makes sense to help clients of either firm to overcome challenges. So, in many ways, this arrangement represents the “best of both worlds,” enabling each firm to play to its strengths.
How do you plan to compete with other established firms in the Japanese employment and domestic disputes space?
During our many years with Freshfields, we had the privilege of working with very sophisticated clients from many countries with various backgrounds. We understand the needs of international clients, and focus on providing creative solutions, rather than just pointing out the risks or providing long analysis on Japanese law issues. We believe that such proactive approach has been appreciated by our clients and highly regarded in the market: while at Freshfields, we won the Employment Law Firm of the Year at the ALB Japan Law Awards three times since 2013. We are probably the only independent law firm in Tokyo formed by Japanese partners who have spent more than 15 years with a first-class global law firm like Freshfields, and genuinely believe that we are best placed to provide high quality Japanese employment law and domestic disputes advice to international clients.
What do you hope to achieve in the next 12 months? What are the firm's top priorities?
We are focusing on four areas. On our Japanese employment practice, we are focusing on expanding our client base, especially our client sectors so that we can engage in a wider variety of mandates. We are also focusing on expanding the types of disputes we work on for our domestic disputes practice and have already started to work on a number of exciting new mandates.
Our largest and most exciting challenge is to build a financial regulatory practice under Naoki Kinami’s leadership, since we believe that the practice fits very well with the strategy of our firm, namely, providing high-quality specialized Japanese law advice to international clients.
Last, but not least, we are very much focused on replicating Freshfields’ approach, namely to create a law firm that cares about its people, and strives to maintain a healthy work-life balance for all our staff, including, of course, our very talented associates.
To contact the writer, please email john.kang@tr.com.