Mr. James Hough, Partner, Litigation Department, Morrison & Foerster

Businesses are facing increased scrutiny of their business practices from regulators and other authorities.  This often results in a need to put in place a system to conduct internal investigations.

Investigations can vary in their structure, from simple fact finding to more overarching and complex risk assessments.  To facilitate these processes, external firms are often brought in to  provide support.

In this seminar, James Hough from Morrison & Foerster will set out compliance-related lessons learned from conducting internal investigations in Japan over the past 4 years including for financial services firms. The presentation will cover:

• Corruption/Fraud Risks
• Books and Records/Internal Control Risks
• Antitrust Compliance
• Data Protection
• Privilege Issues
• Best practices for internal investigations

James Hough is the head of the Tokyo office Litigation Department. Mr. Hough’s practice focuses on complex commercial litigation and arbitration, with an emphasis on intellectual property disputes. His matters have included breach-of-contract claims, joint venture dissolutions, trade secret misappropriation claims and distribution agreement disputes, among other subjects. Mr. Hough has also conducted internal investigations and represented witnesses and subjects of government investigations. Mr. Hough is licensed as a Gaikokuho Jimu Bengoshi and is a member of the Daini Tokyo Bar Association.

Mr. Hough’s patent litigation experience spans a variety of technical fields, including biotechnology, semiconductors, medical devices and business methods. His copyright experience includes matters involving software, jewelry and toy designs, and rights to musical compositions. In a high-profile case, he represented the author and publisher of the best-selling book Memoirs of a Geisha.Mr. Hough was selected as an “IP Star” for the 2016 edition of Managing Intellectual Property’s World IP Survey. He is recommended in the 2017 edition of The Legal 500 Asia Pacific in the areas of Intellectual Property and Dispute Resolution. He is also recommended in the 2016 edition of Intellectual Asset Management’s IAM Patent 1000.Mr. Hough is a member of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association (for which he served as vice chair of the Intellectual Property Committee of the Commercial & Federal Litigation Section), and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (for which he served as Secretary of the Arbitration Committee).Mr. Hough obtained his law degree (J.D. 1986) cum laude from New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Snow scholar, a member of the Order of the Coif, and a recipient of the John Norton Pomeroy and the Maurice Goodman Memorial Prizes. Mr. Hough was the head of Litigation Department in the New York office from 2007–2011.