Brief History of the Firm

Our firm was established in 1950 by Thomas L. Blakemore, who was soon joined by Masatsugu Mitsuki, and is the most traditional international law firm in Japan.

Mr. Blakemore was born in 1915 in the U.S.A. and grew up in the State of Oklahoma. In 1938, Mr. Blakemore was admitted to the bar in Oklahoma. He studied international law at Cambridge University in England and Japanese law at Tokyo Imperial University after he had begun practicing law in the U.S.A. After the Second World War, Mr. Blakemore returned to Japan. He worked both in the U.S. Department of State and in the Ministry of Justice in the United States GHQ of MacArthur. In 1949, he was the only non-Japanese to pass the special law examination of that period and obtain a full license to practice law in Japan. Mr. Blakemore then started a law office and subsequently he and Mr. Mitsuki became partners and established our firm, Blakemore & Mitsuki.
Since then the firm has developed, with maintaining an appropriate size of its attorneys, and has obtained stable reliance from first-rated foreign and Japanese companies in respect of the fields of, among other things, corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, securitization, commercial and investment banking regulations, and litigation. Furthermore, the firm has recently strengthened its capability in respect of the fields of commercial and investment banking regulations, litigation and admiralty by arranging to have several groups of attorneys having expertise therein added to it. The firm intends to arrange to have its professional staff further trained to meet the increasing needs of foreign and Japanese companies and international and Japanese societies for legal services, and to have its internal systems further strengthened for the purpose of providing to its clients legal services of high quality in a timely manner.

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