Author: Shiori Yamamoto LLM '15

How a Temple Law School Education Helped Shape My Legal Career in U.S. Law

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When a partner attorney at Uryu & Itoga, the law firm where I work as paralegal, recommended to me to go to Temple Law School (Japan campus) to earn an LL.M. degree in U.S. law, I was overjoyed and literally grabbed the chance. Studying at a U.S. law school and earning an LL.M. degree had been my dream for as long as I could remember. My father was one of the earliest Japanese legal professionals to earn an LL.M. degree at a U.S. law school in recent Japanese history. He studied at Michigan Law School in the early 1970s, and while Mitsui & Co. is presently known as one of the major international Japanese trading companies to dispatch legal personnel overseas, he was the first legal employee to actually succeed in earning an LL.M. degree from that company, having been dispatched to the U.S. law school with high expectations from his colleagues. Partly due to the influence of my father, I was so deeply interested in U.S. law that I studied Anglo-American common law and …

My Experiences as an In-House Paralegal and Legal Translator ~ Legal Translation as a Legal Profession

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When I started my career as an in-house legal translator at a law firm ten years ago, little was I aware of the exciting journey the profession would eventually bring about for me. Having had the valuable opportunity to earn an LL.M. degree (masters of law degree) in US law at Temple Law School, the only ABA-accredited US law school with a campus in Japan, while working full time as an in-house paralegal and legal translator at my workplace (Uryu & Itoga, a Japanese law firm mainly engaged in corporate affairs), the perspectives from which I am able to view my professional environment, as well as my professional legal work, have undergone a drastic change. Previously, translating legal contracts (whether from Japanese into English or from English into Japanese) was an automatic task for me, changing the legal terms and concepts into another language without much room for deep thought. Now, when I read contracts drafted in English, whether when doing legal translation or performing contract or legal document review as a paralegal, I am …