MoForever Alumni News - Summer 2019

5 | MoForever Summer 2019 Tell us about your role at SoftBank. I joined as SoftBank was transitioning from an operating company to a global holding and investment company. As SoftBank Group’s chief legal officer and chief compliance officer, I interact daily with business leaders across the globe in Japan, China, India, the U.S., the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America and advise them on legal, compliance, and corporate governance issues. I also oversee our largest, most complex transactions. What most surprised you about your new role? I always thought of MoFo and my practice there as cross-border and global in nature. I was very surprised when I arrived at SoftBank to learn how much more globally interactive my job is with SoftBank. I find myself constantly interacting with people in the U.S., Japan, Europe, Latin America, India, and the Middle East, which requires a great deal of travel and some inconvenient hours. In addition, I have come to understand the role of deal lawyers and advisors from the in-house perspective, which is quite different from the view I had as a partner in a law firm. What are some of the early challenges you faced? Prior to my arrival, SoftBank outsourced most of its legal matters, and the legal team we did have had been balkanized into separate self-standing groups based upon geography. My first two tasks were to recruit and build our legal and compliance teams and to restructure our operations to take an integrated and coordinated global approach. I was pleased to learn that recruiting great talent internally to SoftBank was easier than I had expected. I would like to thank my former colleagues at MoFo for being so supportive to our recruiting efforts and agreeing to second people to fill gaps in our team. I also quickly realized that compliance needs specialized expertise and, fortunately, through the network of in-house lawyers I had met while a partner at MoFo, was able to recruit a senior