The Deep End Strategy: How Nancy Miyaji Chose High Risk, High Responsibility to Build her Legal Career
What do you do when a global financial crisis derails your carefully planned legal career before it even begins? Rather than hold out for the law firm role she wanted, Nancy Miyaji threw herself into the deep end and built her career anyway. With a superpower of bridging perspectives, Nancy's story is one of resilience, clarity of purpose that shows another successful pathway in law, whatever is happening around you.
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In this episode you’ll hear:
How arriving in Japan at age 11 without a word of Japanese forged a resilience that still her today
Choosing a startup role during the global financial crisis when no law firm jobs were available
The valuable lessons she learned in the deep end working on an IPO and M&A at a start up company
The reframe she would give her younger self: stop asking "why me?" and start asking this instead
Her favourite beverage and other fun facts
About Nancy
Nancy Miyaji is a corporate lawyer whose work focuses on cross-border transactions, compliance, and corporate matters in Japan and internationally.
She is a Foreign Lawyer at Iwata Godo and a member of the New York Bar.
Her experience spans both private practice and global companies, including Simmons & Simmons and Hitachi, where she has worked on cross-border transactions, compliance, and corporate matters.
Rather than following a conventional legal career path, Nancy has built a career across private practice and in-house environments, developing her own perspective on professional growth and success.
She holds an LL.B. from Kyushu University and an LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and works in Japanese, English, and Chinese.
Outside of work, Nancy enjoys pushing her limits. She played competitive table tennis in her youth and later led her high school mountaineering club. She has since climbed Mount Fuji and completed the Saitama Marathon. She is also passionate about volunteer work supporting foreign women in Japan to achieve success on their own terms.
Connect with Nancy
Website: https://www.iwatagodo.com/english/lawyers/miyaji_nancy.html
Links
Seattle’s Best Coffee: https://www.jrff.co.jp/seabest/
Connect with Catherine
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/oconnellcatherine/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawyeronair
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Lawyer on Air was the winner of the Bronze Award in the “Best Podcast by a Kiwi Abroad Category” in the New Zealand Podcast Awards 2021.
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