Bill Clinton: “I was just going to make one other comment about this. You made a very perceptive observation when you said the Justice…”

“I was just going to make one other comment about this. You made a very perceptive observation when you said the Justice Ministry only has this issue to negotiate and we've got nothing to give back because they can't imagine why Japanese lawyers would set up offices in New York to do business or anything like that. I mean, I can understand that. Most people just assume when they go to another country they'll use lawyers who understand the law and practice in those countries. But one of the big problems we've got in America, as I'm sure you know, is that we don't have enough lawyers who are facilitators and we have too many who are, in effect, litigators. We have too many who slow down the operations of the private sector rather than who speed it up. And there may be a little something we can do on the political side by indirection, by, you know, by sort of saying that Japanese companies doing business in America--one of the things that this administration is looking at in the whole productivity mix is how we can reduce the cost of litigation and the cost of decision making and the delays there. And there may be some merit in our taking some initiative to bring some Japanese lawyers who do business work to the United States to work with American lawyers, to work with American businesses to see if we can kind of change the culture a bit and maybe some of the laws in our country. That is a little something we could give back, and it wouldn't do us any harm to do that anyway.”