Corporate crisis management and compliance is one of the areas for which we are the most known in the market. Tsugio Yada, one of Nozomi’s founding lawyers is a former prosecutor who was in the Special Investigation Unit of Tokyo District Public Prosecutors’ Office, which is responsible for white color crimes. We also have a number of attorneys who worked for regulators before joining Nozomi, including the Prosecutors’ Offices, the Financial Services Agency, the Bank of Japan, the Japan Fair Trade Commission and the Consumer Affairs Agency. With the knowledges and experiences they obtained at those agencies, we are able to advise our clients with the best approach to deal with regulators in their corporate crisis cases.

In addition, many of our attorneys have experiences in working as in-house counsel, which enable us to provide advice on effective pre-crisis management – preparation of corporate compliance policy tailored to each client’s organization and operation, detection of wrongdoings or their signs in early stages, and employee and executive compliance trainings.

In corporate crises, one of the most important things is to protect and minimize damages to the clients’ reputation. Nozomi’s lawyers have guided our clients in many corporate crisis cases which drew the public’s attention, and provided advice on their customer and media relations.

Compliance issues are becoming more and more international, and we are seeing the increase of compliance issues reported at a subsidiary level outside of Japan, such as bribery to foreign officials, involvement in a price fixing conspiracy, receipt of kickbacks, and embezzlement by local employees. Our compliance team has extensive experience in collaborating with local counsel and responding to investigations by local authorities.