Kozo Kawai Bio

Kozo Kawai is a partner and a former member of the executive committee of the firm. For the past twenty years, Mr. Kawai’s practice has focused on anti-trust/competition matters and international trade affairs, and he has handled large scale dispute cases and domestic and foreign regulatory investigations. Mr. Kawai’s anti-trust/competition practice covers every area of the practice, i.e., violation cases such as cartel and unilateral conduct, merger regulations, and compliance to prevent violations of Japanese and foreign competition laws. Mr. Kawai continues to be recognized by international law journals such as Chambers, Legal 500, GCR, Who’s Who Legal, and the Global Competition Review as one of the top practitioners in Japan in the area of competition law. In particular, in the area of international cartel cases, Mr. Kawai has been working as a global hub for Japanese clients and coordinating the work of foreign lawyers from various jurisdictions, and as a local counsel for foreign clients before the JFTC. In the area of merger regulation, Mr. Kawai successfully represented several major Japanese industries with regard to large scale merger and acquisition transactions, such as the merger between Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal, the JX Group integration, the business integration between Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. and Hitachi, Ltd. on thermal power generation systems, the business integration of Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba on medium and small size TFT-LCDs as their global counsel and coordinated the work of lawyers from many jurisdictions before many competition authorities. In particular, Mr. Kawai represented a group of Japanese steel mills as lead counsel, strongly opposing BHP Billiton’ s proposed takeover bid for Rio Tinto, which was eventually abandoned by BHP Billiton. In the area of international trade law, Mr. Kawai is widely recognized as a pioneer of trade law practice in Japan and has advised both the private sector and governmental agencies. Mr. Kawai has been involved in most of the trade remedy investigations conducted by the Japanese authorities to date, such as those for the imposition of anti-dumping duties and subsidy countervailing duties as counsel to Japanese and foreign clients, and in some overseas trade remedy investigations to defend Japanese clients. In addition, Mr. Kawai’s practice covers export regulations and disputes arising from the WTO Government Procurement Agreement for private sectors, as well as WTO dispute settlement procedures for government agencies.