As is often said “Time flies”, something of 18 years has already passed since Mr. Ogawa had first registered as a qualified lawyer at law, and also, even more than 20 years has flown since he had passed the state bar examination. The bar examination in Japan was extremely difficult because its pass rate had been for a long time only around 2-3%. At that time, Mr. Ogawa had truly poor and snowy days. He worked very hard at every single moment, day in and day out, as he remembers was a good memory now.
Driven by his big motivation that the first stage as his career should start with a provincial area, he started working for a small office within the district of Kawagoe area, where huge lack in hands of attorneys was recognized more than having been expected. In the district there was actually more than 1,6 million population of general publics whereas the district had less than 20 actual hands of attorneys. Every day was so busy, but there in that location, Mr. Ogawa learnt to master the basic skills and professional mind as a Japanese attorney.
Then, Mr. Ogawa meet with an opportunity to study aboard in UK, where he was able to be awarded with 2 master degrees, LL.Ms in University of London (both in UCL and SOAS). He was also trained in one of the Mega firms in London. After his returns to Japan, Mr. Ogawa restarted his career based on his home city, Nagoya, the third largest city in Japan. However, since he now has clients also in Tokyo and in Yokohama, he is comfortably travelling every week by Shinkansen super express between Nagoya and Tokyo/Yokohama.
Because of his career in London for 3 years, Mr. Ogawa is now increasingly dealing with overseas legal projects in different jurisdictions. Most recently, his life is so busy that he has business trips to overseas more than 10 times in a year, Mr. Ogawa feels great satisfactions and fulfillments to act on behalf of Japanese corporations in different jurisdictions, so as to help develop their overseas business projects for marketing Japanese distinguished goods and services.
Regardless of their sizes, Japanese corporations holds splendid technologies, which are always greatly highly admired in the world.
Mr. Ogawa is dealing not only with big corporations(ex. listed in stock-exchange market), but also is enthusiastically involved in assisting medium/small size Japanese corporations. His motive is always, regardless of the sizes of the corporations, to provide his clients with professional legal assistances, without compromising the qualities of services.
In the meanwhile, he is also dealing with domestic cases mainly focused on business area, such as company cases, M&A (amicable/hostile), intellectual properties, corporate governance, information technologies, financing and trusts, while because of his career in Kawagoe he is able to deal with many other fields such as family law and other civil laws.
He sometimes even takes no account of incomes and simply pursues for the definite goal to be achieved for the sake of his client’s honor and justice. This often happens his pro bono activities for poor and unfortunate people.
Having achieved academic career in overseas university, Mr. Ogawa is now teaching in two universities. One is for research and educational purpose to provide lectures for foreign students all in English, and the other one is for more practical business area to teach Japanese corporate entreprenuers in MBA course of business school (Tokyo and Nagoya campuses). He finds a big pleasure in himself, when his past students advance and succeed in business society after graduation. Recently, as Mr. Ogawa is both a practitioner and a scholar, he is often invited to speak in international conferences held in the world, such as LAWASIA conference, St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, and others.
Lastly, Mr. Ogawa strongly believes, regardless of international or domestic lawyers, the most important part as legal profession is, his personality, responsibility, and passion , as “a professional noblee”. He wishes to be helpful to any cases as a Japanese lawyer, being strong at overseas projects, as well as reliable in domestic projects.
October, 2017