Compliance & Risk Management

If there is any misconduct that occurs in connection with a company’s corporate activities (breach of duty to disclose, false labeling, involvement of organized crime, legal and regulatory violations, etc.), both the company and its executives will incur direct damages as well as losses that result from the diminishment of the company’s brand image. In recent years, there has been an increasing concern over violations of foreign laws and regulations, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the U.S. and the EU competition laws, due to a number of cases where global companies have been subjected to heavy fines and surcharges.

To prevent such legal violations and other misconduct, our firm offers compliance and risk management services to our clients, such as creating a compliance program, conducting training sessions, setting up and maintaining external compliance hotlines, and assisting with internal audits (intracompany and intragroup audits). If an incident actually occurs, we will take prompt action in relation to the relevant parties (customers, suppliers, regulatory authorities, employees, etc.) and set up an independent committee. There are attorneys at our firm who are licensed to practice in the U.S. (New York) and who have previously practiced in Europe, so we are able to provide our clients with explanation and advice from a comparative law perspective.

For information regarding domestic and foreign competition laws such as the Antimonopoly Act, please also see the “Antimonopoly Act, Subcontracting Act, Premiums and Representations Act” page.

Representative matters in which our attorneys have been involved

• Maintains an external compliance hotline for a publicly held company under the Whistleblower Protection Act and handles a variety of matters, ranging from general inquiries to the reporting of misconduct.
• Advised our client on how to deal with unreasonable demands that it received in connection with the recall of a product.
• Have assisted in the establishment of compliance programs and the conducting of compliance training in various industries.
• Supporting external and internal audits by working together with our clients’ compliance and internal audit departments.

Publications

• Overview of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Shoji Homu) (co-author)
• From the front lines of compliance and whistleblower hotlines (NBL, No. 872)
• Brazil Law Report (4): Amendment of the Anti-Corruption Law (Teikoku Databank, Foreign Market Specialists Newsletter Seminar, 2013)
• Aggressive application of foreign corrupt practices laws: Latest legal developments in Canada, etc. (Teikoku Databank, Foreign Market Specialists Newsletter Seminar, 2012)