Kimitoshi Yabuki

Kimitoshi Yabuki is the managing partner of Yabuki Law Offices, and specialises in international and domestic antitrust and litigation practice. He represents international and domestic clients in IT, IP, electronics, transportation, construction and other manufacturing industries in antitrust and competition fields, particularly in the cartel, bid rigging, unfair trade practice, private monopolisation and merger regulation cases. The recent international cartel cases in which he has been involved are, for example, airline fuel surcharge, DRAM, SRAM, marine hose, TFT-LCD, CRT, high voltage power cable, forwarder, auto-parts and auto-shipping cases. He has also been involved in those in unilateral conducts and IP-related cases in the international stage, including the Qualcomm case in the JFTC hearing. He has also worked on many domestic antitrust cases such as the bridge construction bid-rigging case, the forwarder price-fixing case, the auto-parts price fixing case and the JASRAC private monopolisation case.

He is a professor of antitrust law at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy. He is the secretary general of the Japan Competition Law Forum, the largest organisation of antitrust lawyers in Japan, and secretary general of the task force on amendments to the Antimonopoly Act at the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, as well as the vice president of the Asia Competition Association, the international organisation among practitioners and professors in Korea, China and Japan. He has participated in various international conferences organised by the IBA and the ABA as a speaker or a panellist, including the cartel workshops in 2008 (San Francisco), 2010 (Paris), 2012 (Vancouver) and 2014 (Rome). He is the co-author of several law books and has written numerous articles on antitrust. In 2012 and 2013 Yabuki Law Offices was selected by Global Competition Review as a highly recommended firm in Japan

He is currently member of the audit and supervisory board of Ricoh Company, Ltd. Between 2008 and 2012 he was an independent director of the board of Eisai Co, Ltd, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Japan. Between 2000 and 2003 he was an outside independent auditor of UPS Japan KK.

Mr Yabuki graduated from the University of Tokyo (LLB, 1982) and Columbia Law School, NY (LLM, 1991). He was admitted as an attorney-at-law in Japan (1987) and in New York (1992). He also worked as lawyer from abroad at Covington and Burling in Brussels and Washington, DC (1991-1993).