Ex-head of resignation assistance firm gets suspended sentence

The Tokyo District Court on Friday found the former head of Albatross, a resignation assistance service provider, and a former employee of the company guilty of earning profit from referring customers to lawyers without a license to practice law.

Presiding Judge Yoshihiro Hayashi sentenced the firm’s former president, Shinji Tanimoto, 37, to two years in prison, suspended for three years, and the former employee, his 32-year-old wife, Shiori, to 18 months, suspended for three years. Albatross was fined ¥2 million.

It is a “large-scale and professional crime that could affect the fair operation of the lawyer system,” Hayashi said. The couple “disregarded legal compliance in order to prioritize profit despite being aware of the risks,” he said.

Public prosecutors have argued that the defendants profited by arranging lawyers for their customers who had trouble with their employers, such as unpaid wages, and wanted to quit their companies. Because the lawyers pointed out that receiving referral fees was illegal, the defendants received ¥16,500 per customer under the guise of donations from nominal labor unions of customers’ companies, the prosecutors said.

Tanimoto and his wife were found guilty of referring 174 customers to two lawyers between June 2023 and February 2025 in order to make a profit without a license to practice law.