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In 1957, the late Yasuo Kimura of Sakai, Osaka and Yuki Matoba of Wakayama met each other for the first time at an inn in Kyoto, where they were about to take the bar exam. The two men passed the exam the same year, registered as practicing lawyers in 1960 and went on to open Kimura, Matoba Godo Horitsu Jimusho (Kimura & Matoba Joint Law Office) in Nishitenma, Osaka in 1965.
The prevailing style of law practice then and even now is sole proprietorship, where a single lawyer runs a law office and single-handedly takes charge of all cases. Novice and inexperienced lawyers just joining the law profession work for such sole proprietors to gain expertise and experience, and subsequently move on to establish their own practice as sole proprietors.
Kimura and Matoba thought that the sole proprietorship style of law practice had limited resources in coping with the growing complexity and sophistication of modern society. They envisioned a law office where multiple lawyers could participate in the management of the office as partners. For individual career development, the lawyers would specialize and gain in-depth experience in their respective areas of practice, and as a team they would work together by complementing each other with their respective strengths through cross-sharing to solve complex cases with speed and accuracy. Along the way, the office would accumulate, on a collective basis, the expertise and experience shared by its lawyers, which, together with the trust earned from its clients, would be passed on to later generations of new lawyers joining the office.
In 1968, the office was renamed Dojima Law Office, when Toshio Kawamura, a former judge who had completed his legal training at the Legal Research and Training Institute of the Supreme Court with Kimura and Matoba, accepted his former classmates' invitation to join the office. This marked the official beginning of the pioneering endeavor in Osaka, to run a law office based on the joint practice approach.
In the following five decades thereafter, a number of lawyers who share the same aspirations have joined the Office as partners. The Office has actively been involved on a wide variety of cases, and it has evolved to what it is today by the continual support extended to it by a wide spectrum of individual and corporate clients.
In 2010, Dojima Law Office established a limited liability partnership and opened its Tokyo Office to better serve its clients' diverse needs.
Dojima Law Office is a professional group of lawyers who are united under the belief that to maximize the benefit to its clients, legal professionals must refine and elevate their respective areas of expertise as individual lawyers while at the same time be willing to share their knowledge and experience among themselves to allow speedy, flexible and concerted delivery of optimal legal services.
In today's incessantly changing economy and society characterized by increasingly diverse and complex legal needs, the genuine strength of Dojima Law Office is put to the test.
Just as in the past and even more so in the future, we at Dojima Law Office, remain committed to serving our clients as dependable legal professionals who are always on their side.