TMI Associates

ESTABLISHED IN 1990

Total number of professionals: 536 (178 partners)
Principal office: Tokyo
Other offices in Japan: Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Fukuoka
Overseas offices: Shanghai, Beijing, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Yangon, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Singapore, Silicon Valley, London

Key practice areas

Antitrust & competition; asset management; aviation & space; banking & finance; capital markets; corporate, M&A; dispute resolution; energy; financial regulatory; fintech; insurance; intellectual property; international trade & investment; labour & employment; life sciences; maritime & shipping; media & entertainment; private equity; real estate & construction; restructuring & insolvency; risk management & investigation; structured finance; tax; telecommunications & technology; venture capital

Our services

Since its establishment more than 30 years ago, TMI Associates has grown rapidly, both numerically and geographically, while maintaining its progressive culture. We continue to follow one of the guiding objectives on which the firm was founded: “Responding to a world that through globalisation is becoming ever more borderless.”

Its original 11 members have increased so that now TMI is the second-largest law firm in Japan, with more than 620 attorneys and patent attorneys based in 16 offices. In addition to its six Japanese domestic offices, the firm has international branch offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Yangon, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Singapore, Silicon Valley, and London. TMI provides a wide range of global legal services through those branch offices and its “international desks” that focus on Brazil, France, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Rather than simply seeking to grow in terms of size, TMI has continued to expand strategically based on the concept of providing high quality and prompt services to our clients in their areas of greatest need. We envision the changes in global society that are expected to take place in the next five or 10 years and strive to constantly challenge ourselves in ground-breaking fields, where an established legal market has not yet developed and to always be capable of responding to the needs of the new era.

As examples of how we think out-of-the-box to respond to client needs that accompany new technological and legal developments, in 2019, we established TMI Privacy & Security Consulting to provide data-driven consulting services relating to the protection of personal information and cybersecurity issues.

One of our principal missions as a law firm is to follow fast-breaking developments in the law and related fields and seek new possibilities so that we can offer varied solutions to our clients to enable them to make balanced and sound decisions. We will continue to enhance and expand our areas of specialisation while ensuring that we are internally integrated throughout our entire network of offices and international desk to respond to our clients’ ever-changing needs as a full-service law firm in the true sense of the word.