The Legal Information Database that Is Widely Used by Universities, the Legal Community and Company Legal Divisions

It was back in 1972 when TKC announced its “conceptual design of a data bank that focuses on judicial precedents on taxation and others”, so as to be more comprehensive and efficient in helping accounting firms provide legal advice and guidance in the course of their tax consultation with clients. Later in its history, TKC’s legal information database containing information on judicial precedents in all fields of law came to be widely recognized as having great social value. It is now widely used not only by accounting firms but also legal and academic communities, companies and more.
TKC’s legal information database LEX/DB Internet maintains an archive of judicial precedents and other information covering all legal fields from precedents set in the former Supreme Court dating back to 1875 to those most recently published, boasting to be the largest legal database in Japan containing more than 324,000 judicial precedents (as of December 31, 2021). It is now used by more than 23,000 customers (52,000 users) including TKC member firms, universities, law schools, government offices, law offices, patent offices, company legal divisions, and more.
In conjunction with the opening of law schools in 2004, TKC developed, jointly with Waseda University, the Law School Educational and Research Support System, which supports bidirectional/multidirectional lectures and students’ self-learning. Along with this development, TKC started offering the TKC Law Library, a comprehensive legal database that enables a search for judicial precedents from anywhere at any time on a 24/7 basis. This is based on the LEX/DB Internet service and allows its users to do a cross-search for contents from prominent legal publishers in Japan. As of December 31, 2021, it was adopted by 39 out of the total 40 law schools (98% share), faculties of law, and legal professional training courses, and used by over 18,000 faculty members and students.
Furthermore, to help students majoring in law etc. acquire qualifications and find work, TKC is working closely with universities to provide web-based study tools to prepare for examinations such as the civil service examinations, practical business law examination, jurisprudence examination, and practical business credit management examination.
In addition, from the viewpoint of providing the total support for creating a learning and educational environment for fostering legal professionals by combining law, education, and IT, TKC offers, in addition to the systems for law schools, various services including the Support System for Law School Graduates and the TKC Law Library (for Legal Apprentices).In June 2010, we also started selling the TKC Law Library (Overseas Edition) through our agents to international markets, in response to the increasing needs by government agencies, universities, and other organizations in Asian countries including South Korea and Taiwan for a database that allows searches for comprehensive legal information on judicial precedents, laws and regulations, and literature of Japan available on a 24/7 basis. It currently has more than 75 users, and the number has been increasing year by year.
The TKC Law Library contains more than 2.65 million items of specialized data related to laws etc. provided by more than 16 legal publishers, including Gyosei, Nippon Hyoron-Sha, Yuhikaku Publishing, Hanrei Times, Hosokai and the Japanese Institute of Business Law. Also, in June 2021, TKC launched Legal Book Search, which allows users to view specialized books on laws, etc., in addition to the judicial precedents, laws and regulations, bibliographic information references, and specialized law magazines that were already available. In this way, the TKC Law Library continues to evolve as an easy-to-use legal information database for research and business practices.