Around the same time most major law firms in the United States were deciding to go global, their Japanese counterparts were thinking the opposite.

“From the late nineties to [the 2008 economic downturn], all Japanese firms have been kept busy purely by domestic work,” says Hisashi Hara, chairman of Tokyo’s Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu, noting the wave of restructuring and mergers and acquisitions work that accompanied Japan’s decadelong 1990s recession.