A kujishi (公事師), sometimes translated as suit solicitor, was a person who assisted private citizens in litigation in Japan during the Edo period.
The kujiyado were had an authorized monopoly that required litigants to stay at them and register their location with the magistrate.
[13] The shogunate prohibited the kujishi's activities, and on one occasion they were driven out of Tokyo by a mob, although this had little effect on their numbers.
[13] The negative perception of the kujishi has sometimes been credited with delaying popular acceptance of a Western-style system of legal representation in Japan.
[15] They accordingly received little attention from international scholarship; until the 1950s, the only non-Japanese source discussing the kujishi was John Henry Wigmore's Panorama of the World's Legal Systems.