Of course that statistic is only relevent if lawyers in Japan do the same things as Lawyers in the U.S.

While I can't speak about Japan, sometime ago I had read an interesting article about these statistics comparing the number of lawyers and lawsuits between differant countries.

The article pointed out that the title of lawyer is not always the same and in many countries tasks which are performed by American Lawyers are performed by professionals with other titles. Therefore you need to actually compare the number of legal professionals between the two countries and when that is done there is not much differnce in First World Countries.

The other statistic challenged was a commonly refered to fact that the U.S. had higher per capita litigation rates than other countries. The Article claimed that this statistic was warped by what it called unavoidable litigation. They said that if you did not count Probate and Divorce proceedings (most of which in the U.S. are not contested) that U.S. per capita litigation rates compared favorably with other countries. The reason that one would discount these uncontested proceedings is that with out a real dispute the litigation is more a formality or ministerial act.

I'm not sure I agree that Divorces shouldn't be counted. They usually seem to be disputed.

But I've always said the problem isn't that there are to many lawyers, the problem is that there are to many laws.